Daven’s Rock Pile

There were a couple of caches up in the mountains that, after almost a month, remained unfound. I thought today would be a good day to rectify that situation.

They were on the same path, about a 3 mile round-trip from the nearest parking.

The weather report called for a chance of thunderstorms in the mountains, so I figured I better put the top up on Eugene the Jeep. I hate doing that, but I’ve learned the hard way what happens when I don’t pay attention to the weather.

Sure enough, as I approached the second cache, I could hear thunder in the distance. Fortunately, I always do my best to be prepared for anything when I’m caching in the wilderness, including lightning, so I had my long-handled umbrella, golf club, and aluminum extension ladder.

Just kidding, honey, you know I don’t own any golf clubs. I felt a few raindrops, but that was about as bad as it got, which isn’t bad at all.

I will admit that I’m not a fan of ‘rockpile’ caches. Quite the opposite, in fact. They seem like a lot of drudgery to me.

As it turns out, though, this rockpile wasn’t as bad as I had feared, and I found the pill bottle-sized cache fairly quickly.

On the way out, I saw this strangely-speckled tree.

On closer inspection, I saw that it was covered with some sort of mushroom. Being a rather fun guy myself, I thought it was kind of neat.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I did get both First-to-Finds.

Mound City Historical Park

A very difficult find. We searched for a long time, and I might have given up had my brother (the handsome fellow pictured above) not been with me. But I felt like I had to set a good example, so I stayed the course until TA-DAA!

Boulware

This marker was placed away from all the others, behind a tree, and I wouldn’t have known it was there had it not been for the nearby cache. That kind of appeals to me. Maybe, when it’s my time, I’ll ask that I be laid to rest in a spot where only family, friends and geocachers can find me.

Low Water Bridge

One of the few caches you’ll see mentioned on this blog that I did not find.

As we parked the car and started walking toward Ground Zero, we realized we were on the wrong side of the “Low Water Bridge”. From where we were standing, the GPS indicated we were 100 feet from the cache…which was just on the other side of the river. We were a bit pressed for time, so we opted not to detour around.

This was not the first time I approached a cache from the wrong side of the river. In fact, it happens often enough that a local cacher placed a cache in my honor named “The Wrong Side of the River.”

Park Cemetery

As we were driving away from the cache site, my brother slammed on the brakes, threw the car into reverse, and backed up so I could get a shot of this. It was in someone’s front yard.