First Day of Winter Caching

The first day of winter caching takes some getting used to even after all these years. There are always questions like:

* Gloves, gloves and hand warmers, or crazy brave bare hands?
* Will the dogs be okay or should they stay behind while we go play?
* Do we need to carry a snow brush to find the containers hidden beneath the snow?

In the end we happily go out and cache while hunting caches which are much harder to find when buried beneath a carpet of snow. The cold weather is accompanied by much shorter days and earlier sunsets on those days when the sun actually peaks through the greyness. We know more DNF's are the reality of winter caching. This will be our fifteenth winter of geocaching. The day after Thanksgiving was our first snowy weather of the year. Ali found a spot where a two and a half-mile hike would take us to nine caches. Our finds were plentiful with only one missed micro which was most likely hidden in one of two flat rocks covered in snow.

A day on the caching trail in this weather gets me closer to spring. It helps me remember that the sun does shine in November in northwest Pennsylvania. It gives us time to be together outdoors. It's also a time to remember how beautiful this area can be.

It's hard to beat an icy stream flowing in the Allegheny National Forest.

Although we never spotted it, we weren't alone as we shared the trail with a turkey.

We dropped a few trackables...

and left a couple unactivated Volunteer Trackables for the next people to follow us.

Some of the caches were really winter friendly.

Some took some work to uncover.

If this is a typical winter, there's about 400 cache finds until spring...