Friday, July 30, 2010

Straight Line Caching

Every now and then, you run across a cache where you think you're smarter than the cache owner.  I've had that happen on one of my caches, where I wanted cache finders to come in one way, but they came in another way.  To be perfectly honest, I hadn't even explored that possibility when I hide the cache.  I've gone in both ways and they both are adventures, although adventures of a different kind.  One is a nice trail, the other requires more bushwhacking.

The Tadpole and I ran into those circumstances while up in Lassen earlier in the month.  The cache is located just outside the park boundary on the western side of the park.  There appears to be several possible access points leading to the cache, but the cache owners give only the western one.  Well, we didn't feel we needed to follow the cache owners instructions, because we're smarter than the cache owner.  Why hike six tenths of a mile, when you only have to hike .17 miles?  Sounds easy, right?

Wrong.  If you look at the cache page, the satellite view of the cache area shows the cache to be in an open area, surrounded by some sparsely scattered bushes.  Well, from ground experience, those sparsely scattered bushes were a dense, impenetrable wall of manzanita bushes.  Scratchy and very dense, it wasn't pleasant trying to bushwhack through those and we gave up, not once, but twice.  We tried from the east which was a third of a mile away.  No go.  We tried from the north which was only .17.  That was even worse.

The Tadpole wanted to try from a service area inside the park, which upon closer inspection shows the other end of the trail that is described on the cache page, but by that time, I'd decided that I'd already donated too much DNA to the surrounding plants, so we went in the cache owner's way.  I was able to get the van in to about a half a mile before we hiked the rest of the way in.  It was an adventure, but I need to remember if in doubt, follow the cache owner's guidance.  They've been there before, you haven't. The shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.

Picture was taken at or near the following geocache:
Loomis - by 2dogs and mtnsteve

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1 comment:

chaosmanor said...

This is pretty funny. I had not yet read this blog when you and I went out caching yesterday. I had no idea that I was quoting you! But I remembered reading your log on this cache, so when I read this blog just now, it all came together.

We've had people go the "wrong way" for some of our caches, and we've done that on a few hunts. Sometimes the wrong way turns out to be the better one. It's all about the adventure, as TRUROKR would say :-)