Hotspur.us

I was already displaying some symptoms of late Winter cabin fever. Gentleman-Carpenter and I had discussed going after this masterpiece of a cache trail the prior weekend. Fortunately Mother Nature had her own plans regarding our schedule. And so after sending out a call for cachers, eight of us (including four-year-old Ally): loyal sidekick Little Wooden Boy, Allysmom24, Nuggie99, wvmikiepar, jbgrug, Gentleman-Carpenter & yours truly, found ourselves at Clover Fork Church ready to depart on our adventure on the Weston Gauley Bridge Turnpike.

For your reference please see our tracklog. But also, you’ll be needing to reference THAT against the zoom-in that will be featured later.

Things started out pretty well. And we were very happy to have Ally along with us since she is just the right size for cache retrieval as she aptly demonstrated early on in our adventure. I suppose this is sort of a spoiler since you can see that the cache is in a stump. But since we are in the woods, there are a lot of stumps. And because I’m super sneaky, I’m not saying which cache this happens to be.

At any rate, we were moving along and doing pretty well despite the crazy town amounts of mud. I’m talking suck your shoe off mud. Fall in and never see the light of day again mud. Splash up and cover your clothing from head to toe mud.  Where was I? Oh right, doing pretty well. Right. Loyal sidekick was doing more of a meander than a hike and had stopped to pick up a handout. He’s so considerate since he knows how I love me some handouts.

We were all enjoying a lovely walk in the woods. The temperature had climbed far above the project 45 degrees promised by the weather prognosticators. The sun came out and the wind was even warm, which was extremely odd. It felt like Spring. So much so that those of us who had over dressed (everyone) were attempting to mash their giant parkas into backpacks of insufficient size.

In fact things were going so well that we felt perhaps we had in fact managed to circumvent the MAGPI Curse of always choosing poorly. There was much merriment and story swapping, cache comparison and mud avoidance.

We crossed a lovely bridge that was most definitely not a swinging bridge of doom and sidekick had to have a spotter in order to retrieve the cache. It was there that we saw a sign that was going to be our undoing. It indicated that the Weston Gauley Bridge Turnpike was UP.  Yes, that is right the one sign we say indicated we should go UP. And since the next cache was called something crazy like On the Ridge Again our merry (but not for much longer) group went up. but not without complaint of course.

After climbing a wicked arse hill and collapsing in the lovely field, some of us enjoyed the view, some just lay on the ground, flopping like fish out of water and gasping for breathe. (No photos of that, that would just have been mean.)

Brilliantly we decided to continue up, despite the cache not getting any closer. Sidekick, jbgrug and I had pulled ahead of the group and I had finally handed sidekick the GPSr (I was using his Garmin as mine has gone missing) when he looked at me, looked at the cache and indicated I was an idiot. Ok, he didn’t really do that, but probably because jbgrug was right there.  It seems that our blind faith in a sign was our undoing as we were not climbing the proper ridge. Yeah, you read that right. MAGPI takes a long walk and makes a bad decision. Game on!

And so after a brief discussion, we bushwhacked (sort of) down to the proper trail and then we were then back on track.Which meant we then had to start back up a different hill. It was much kinder than our wrong hill sidetrack.

The sun was starting to sink low and the warm was retreating so it was time to kick it up a notch and finish this trail off. Also, the idea of re-layering was not high on my agenda. We kicked it up and made a last push for glory….and a car. Because this walking thing, it was getting pretty old.

And so, before I sign off, let me leave you with this warning. Once you have crossed the non-swinging bridge of complete stability, keep low. Do not go UP immediately. You’ll be glad. Just look at the track log of our unnecessary hill climb of doom. See that red stuff? Yeah that was us not focusing. See that space between where there is no track log? You’ll want to walk there.

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As always, there are other photos which you may see by checking out the galleries. And I’ll go ahead right now and give you my disclaimer that the photos here are totally out of order. I’m such a slacker.

My attempts at FTFs have been foiled by many things. Non-cachers, animals, mud, rain, sleet, snow, shortness, work, sickness….but never the Army. Until now.

A still as yet unfound cache was sitting in White Park by the time I was done with work and judging from the satellite image I was pretty certain I could make quite work of it.

The weather was wretched, a solid rain had been beating the city to death since early morning. I decided to stop home and grab my wellies and my parka just in case I couldn’t make quite work of the find.

With my dress pants jammed down in my pink wellies with palomino ponies and my black parka I headed out to the park. As I navigated the speed humps (no fun in a Jeep) I noticed an unusual sign (not quite verbatim, but close enough).

 WVU ARMY ROTC

Maneuvers Today

No Live Rounds

Thank You

Did that mean the park was off limits? It sure didn’t say so. I was confused. (I was also relieved they weren’t using live ammo in White Park.) So I decided to approach the cache from a different angle. I tried a parallel street and was happy to see no signs indicating A) the Army was around or B) the park was off limits.

I popped out of the Jeep and headed onto a nearby trail. I was following the arrow and the trail and was closing in on 75 feet to the cache when I noticed the Army. One squad (unit, troop, platoon?) was holding a small embankment which was really very close to Ground Zero. Another was approaching. Crud.

I wasn’t exactly invisible, what with my pink wellies, and I had clearly attracted the attention of at least one person. It occurred to me that the guys lying in the mud would most likely NOT appreciate me giving their position away while searching for the cache.

Not really willing to give up, but also not wanting to interfere with the Army I developed a secondary plan. I would go home, work out and then come back and hope the Army would be redeployed by then.

By the time I got home I had developed a third plan. I would change clothes and walk to the park, hopefully killing two birds with one stone. It was uncomfortably warm out so I shed the parka’s liner, suited up and headed out into the driving rain storm.

When I arrived at the park I was not happy to see the WVU ARMY ROTC signs still standing. Crud. Like last time I circled the park and approached the cache from the back. I was feeling pretty confident that the Army was close to being done (they were wearing blaze yellow vests at this point) so I headed to Ground Zero.

I was elated to find the cache and see an empty log. Sweet FTF victory!  I unzipped my parka, reached into my inside pocket and found…nothing. Right. My pencil was in the liner pocket. Which was in the foyer hanging on the coat rack.

There I stood, in the driving rain, parka unzipped, hunched over trying to keep the log dry  and no writing implement in hand.

I just did what I always do in these situations. I signed my name with mud. There was plenty to go around.

So last week sidekick and I went out and mapped the trail for our adventure at Mountwood tonight.

We picked up Gentleman-Carpenter at OUCH!!! (yes, as sidekick pointed out, I refer to places by cache names quite a lot) then headed to BW3 in Bridgeport to meet up with the Bumps. And, as it turned out, Aquacache.

Arriving at Mountwood Park we sorted out the car situation and finally rendezvousing with both of AG349 and headed out on the trail…EARLY. Yeah, you read that right. Early, as in ahead of schedule. Unbelievable. Unheard of. Also shocking. Very shocking.

But anyway, we hit the red reflector for #1 with way too much daylight and then realized that…we kind of needed a tiny bit more darkness. Not that we didn’t try. We walked around, using our awesome flashlights to check out all the nearby trees. Gentleman-Carpenter (it turns out) even went in the correct direction but didn’t see anything.

This clearly didn’t concern sidekick much, since he still had data. That makes sidekick a happy camper.

When finally, around 6:23 (that’s about 30 minutes that we’d been hanging out waiting) Aquacache sees a bright eye and notices it happens to be in the direction in which G-C had looked. So of course we immediately begin to blame G-C’s lack of spotting the fire tacks (that’s how this MAGPI thing works you know). Until we noticed some reflective tape and Aquacache said that he’d seen some of that near the trail – you know while we waited 30 minutes because no one saw anything – because he thought it was funky bark. Which of course meant we all then began to blame Aquacache for his lack of focus  (what do you expect from someone with lumpy corneas?).

Eventually the darkness descended and we had an easier time spotting the fire tacks.

We managed, thanks to the hard work of sidekick and yours truly, to stay on trail and even – believe it or not – shave off some time by cutting off a slew of switchbacks.

I feel that at this point in the narrative I should begin to explain that I fell in the creek, not once but several times, we scared up a bear and then got lost. But none of that happened because for once, MAGPI had no mishaps, no poor decisions and everything went better than could have been wished.  I figure that this particular series of night caches will have used up all the good karma I had left.

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It was a beautiful Fall day. The sun was out, the wind was blowing whipping through the trees and Deckers Creek was running way too high for anyone to even think about completing A True W.V.  Geocacher #2. Which meant yours truly was in charge of a back up plan.

Since I had failed to tackle Cannon Hill back in the Spring (it wasn’t my fault, Aquacache had pretty much tried to die before we made much headway) I figured this would be as good an opportunity as any to head back.  And so wvhunter, wvcoalcat, Gentleman-Carpenter, loyal sidekick Little Wooden Boy and I headed to the fine village of Rowlesburg for a nice little hike.

It turned out to be a nice little stroll to the top if you actually follow the (gated) road and don’t try to cheater it by foolishly following an ATV trail to nowhere.

The wind was pretty wicked, but we were not to be daunted. Also, we were working up a little bit of a sweat so a little bit of a breeze felt good – so long as we held on to our hats and kept all our stuff tethered.

We found the cache handily, took in the historic marker and then marched off the crest of the hill (and out of the incredible wind) to take in the view of Rowlesburg.  (For more info on the Battle for Cannon hill clickity HERE.)

From our hilltop perch Rowlesburg looked remarkably like model train town. All neatly ordered, with lawns trimmed and flags flying. It was pretty cool and a fine reward to our day’s labor.

Before heading back down we stopped for a quick group photo (before the wind tried to blow the tripod over) and then headed back down, down, down.

And now…on to the pumpkin pie blizzard.

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