Hotspur.us

3_Dogs had made a brilliant & timely observation last weekend that the Forest Roads in the Mon National Forest would be open until the end of the month – and that with the gates open we could make wvhunter’s Panther Run a park & grab. Loverly!

Unfortunately loyal sidekick was still suffering from The Crud (bronchitis or pneumonia…your choice) and so opted to stay home and not infect the rest of us.  Our motley crew of 3_Dogs, Gentleman-Carpenter, Aquacache & I planned first to tackle Panther Run and then head on over to 89SC’s newest master piece Big Run Waterfall Cache.

Basically the day went like this:

Jeep, jeep, jeep, jeep.

Didn’t we just pass the cache?

Jeep, jeep, jeep.

“Let’s place a cache.”

Jeep, jeep, jeep.

“Woohoo! We found a cache.”

Jeep, jeep, jeep.

Crap, footprints.

Walk. Balk. Stand. Hop, hop, hop.

“Those guys are idiots.”

Wait. Wait. Wait.

“Did ya find it? Oh good, they found it.”

Jeep, jeep, jeep.

Coke ovens!

Jeep.

Waterfall!

Jeep.

Food!

Home again, home again, lickity split.

And now…enjoy our fine photos.

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February is very hit or miss when it comes to weather. Is it gonna be February or Febuly?  (I stole that from Rock_Rat who stole it from someone else.)

(Look closely at the name tag)

Originally MAGPI thought a sledding event would be sweet. Of course, for that to work we’d need snow on the ground and that was not in the cards. Since the weatherman & Mother Nature both hate me with an undying passion, I figured any event required a fail safe backup – you know, a nice toasty warm building where cachers could hang out, play games, gossip and generally enjoy themselves no matter what Mother Nature threw our way. And so, Cabin Fever Cure was born. If it snowed, we’d have a snowman building contest & games. If it didn’t snow, we’d have games. Take THAT Mother Nature!

As it turned out, we did not have any snow. But we had plenty of games. And the park had plenty of caches – especially for those folks who were not from the area, and we had quite a few newcomers.

Nerd (of Nerd and Jock) – she’s the one cracking her knuckles & smiling cautiously -  got the full MAGPI welcome as soon as the gang found out she was “not from ’round here”. (Perfectly legitimate response to one’s first MAGPI encounter.) We like new people….we get to tell them all our old stories and they don’t (normally) doze off!

While some of the new-to-us folks were relatively new cachers, the MAGPI gang was thrilled to finally get to meet the youngest MAGPI – Screaming_Kid! We were honored that he (and his mom and dad) decided that this would be his first ever event and cache!We were a bit confused though, because he surely didn’t live up to his name.

There was a prerequisite amount of geekery, which is no big surprise considering that A) a goodly portion of MAGPI get paid to do computer related things at work and B) MAGPI loves them some bright and shiny gadgetry – not to mention the showing off of said gadgetry. Plus, really, if you’re gonna ask a question about how to….you’ve got a half decent answer (after all the smart arse responses) of getting some good information. It’s not that we’ve been around the block, but yeah, we’ve been around the block when it comes to technology (it hates me, no one come to me – I recommend pbump).

We had plenty of games going on through the day. Easy stuff that you could do as you pleased. Also, stuff that made you look ridiculous. Smash that backpack! Shake that ammo can!

What’s in the Ammo Can? – No one ever guesses this one. But man the answers are AWESOME! My favorite from this round was “A Thing that Goes THUNK!” Accurate, but vague. So we did what we always do and drew a name from all the entries. Wolfpack–6 lucked out and sent one of the little ones up to claim their prize.

What’s in the Backpack? – I love to watch people play this game.  It’s super easy to set up. I just dump out my backpack and then jam 10 things that I figure are essential back in. Secure the zipper and VOILA! Also, it’s a darn good thing that I don’t mind mauled food bars. We had some great answers on this one as well…some outlandish, some accurate, some that had me thinking “What in the world did I leave in there?” A few folks all managed to guess 5 items correctly so once again we had to resort to the ol’ draw a name method. Klutzy Kats scored the win which was NOT my backpack, but rather a small cache ready to be placed.

How Many Things in the Thing – Er…Container – So my bestfriend Purple Monkey Dishwasher constantly sends me endless supplies of swag. She does this because she loves me. Also because she has 3 small children who end up with an awful lot of duplicate toys. That’s why I LOVE this game. I get to clean out my giant box o’ (quality) swag.  The total number of items in that small locking container was 59. Wolfpack–6 guessed 60!

Find the X – This, along with the ammo can toss which we did NOT play for various logistical reasons, has really become a signature MAGPI game. Only usually we have an honest to goodness real live surveyor who goes out and gets us spot on coords. Not this time. This time I, SSPG, took sidekick’s trusty Garmin 60CSx (no I still have not located my Garmin, thanks for asking) and took a reading of ground zero. I averaged 200 waypoints. Needless to say, I was interested to see how well this little game turned out. First to go to the field (because I told him he had to) was my dad, Foxtrot Bravo. He didn’t have his own GPSr with him so I loaned him the 60CSx.

Using the same GPSr as I had used to take coords, even with fresh batteries, didn’t help much. Troopbiz was also having a difficult time getting their GPSr to pick one spot and stick with it. And the artic wind wasn’t doing much to encourage them to give it time!

There was some definite drift visible as we marched out to see who had gotten the closest. I’d been out 30 minutes earlier to do some preliminary measuring and the closest flag at that time was about 10 feet (or rather 10 Doc Martens, size 10) away.

I was about to declare that flag a winner when someone pointed out a flag that was much closer – only four Doc Martens size 10! We were shocked (and stunned, trust me!) to hear that pajamashark had used his iPhone.

I may have heard The Mad Cow sobbing since he recently gave up his iPhone and went back to Android. (I have an Android and before anyone asks, I love it.)

Re-Gift – Every New Year’s Day in the Waterloo, Ontario area there is an event called Re-Gift O’Rama. It sounded hilarious, however New Year’s Day is not always the best day for me (and Purple Monkey Dishwasher) to attend an event.  The day before Knight Who Says Ni and I headed down to the park with some numbered tags. We hung them (usually in pretty obvious places) and took coords. The idea was for each person to bring some tacky gift in ridiculous wrapping paper (duct tape, baby shower, paper bags, christmas paper, garbage bags). Each of those gifts was tagged with a number.

At a designated time I handed out a list that had all the coords for the numbered tags.  First come, first serve! And yes, we were nice and did not put them WAY FAR AWAY. I have a little niceness buried in me somewhere. (Thanks to yours truly not knowing how to work a GPSr there was some confusion regarding a set of coords. Knight Who Says Ni was kind enough to run out before the event started and re-check. You’d think after all this time I’d know what I was doing, you know? )

Dad took charge of the Tag Desk so we’d know what numbers had come in and if anyone had somehow become lost or confused (I refer you to the photo of Rock_Rat from earlier).

Dolphy was back in the door pretty fast and brought not only her tag, but the bit of stick to which it was attached. Such an overachiever.

We had some ridiculously awesome gifts once the paper (duct tape, garbage bags) started getting shredded.

I understand the intended target of that monkey was me…too bad I couldn’t play!

Windphish clearly cleaned up!

pbump was right to be suspicious when he claimed the bag I had brought.

Poor Troopbiz. The last gift to be gotten and an awful reminder that Bigger is Not Better. Yes…someone may have insisted that Aquacache bring that as his exchange gift after he jokingly mentioned it. I won’t name names.

RandomRansom is totally ready for a hard day at the office tomorrow!

Oh wvhunter….what happens at MAGPI stays at MAGPI….but you do look Fabulous Dah-ling!

Many thanks to everyone who showed up, brought delicious food and had fun! And a huge shout out to the folks that helped set up and then clean up! Come early, stay late and we’ll put you to work! As always, this was a fine MAGPI production!

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After checking out the weekend forecast (which can clearly be depended upon in February after all) and determining there was a chance the weather would be decent not horrible, I set my sights on Bethel Park, PA, and laid out a cleverly enticing call for cachers to see who I could ensnare.

Saturday morning dawned a little chilly but the forecast was still promising a very low chance of possible precipitation and that until the afternoon. After meeting up in Waynesburg our two vehicle convoy headed out for South Park. About 30 minutes out from our destination – Escape your T.V. (but don’t wear antlers) – it started snowing. I don’t mean little tiny flurries. I mean snowflakes, big GIANT snowflakes. You know, the big fluffy kind…the ones skiers and kids love to see falling from the sky. Yeah, the forecast was not just slightly off. It was dead wrong. By the time we hit the parking coords the ground was covered and if we stood still, we would be coated in a lovely white blanket.

Not to be daunted and also not wanting to stand still and wait for the others that were to join us (ok, so maybe I didn’t look at my phone and see they were right behind us) we headed out for stage one. Wow, so that’s a terrain 2.5? Well I suppose back in 2006 it might have been. At any rate, once the stage was freed from its frozen tomb, we were ready to head for the final.

Well, once a few of us negotiated our return to the path without any mishaps – and trust me the situation was ripe with potential for mishap injury broken bones. And quite frankly, I wasn’t really in the mood for another trip to the hospital. We were starting to negotiate a small water crossing (small thank god, also navigable) when Jeff_toughsearch and H_B_Happy showed up.  From there it was a short trip up, down, up and up some more…for most of us anyway.

Can you identify the slackers? Or shall they remain anonymous?

The rest of the day pretty much involved us marching around in the snow. We did take the opportunity to choose poorly which mostly just involved us being stymied by a creek (but the cache is only 150 feet over THERE), sliding around (both in vehicles and on foot), going back to our original parking spot and then taking a perilous (but much shorter) route back to the vehicles.

I should probably step back and explain the name of this post, which will go a long ways to explaining our drunken route along a park full of caches. There is a challenge cache in Morgantown called Square-Root of 9 Ge0-Challenge.   In order to earn the smilie, one MUST find 3 caches of 3 different cache types IN ONE DAY. So when wvhunter looked at the vast expanse of South Park and realized it was chock-a-block full of different types of caches, he decided that we were gonna get this challenge done.  That meant we were going after (at least) 3 traditional caches, 3 multi-caches and 3 unknown caches. Bring it.

While we were hard at work tracking down traditionals (“That’s enough! On to the puzzle caches!” shouted Captain OCD. He is such a slave driver.) we were joined by egroeg who is the Master of South Park.  Thank goodness, because figuring out which roads when were was going to be more of an undertaking that our brain trust was capable of at this point in the day.

By the time we finished up the caches on wvhunter’s list and a few more (That’s NOT on the list!) we were wet, cold and tired. So we headed out to Barley’s & Hop’s. Which, as you can see, was a fine end to the caching day.

More pics available for your viewing pleasure. But I’ll be honest, the snow was so wet and heavy I didn’t take many photos.

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Thanks Mr. Weatherman.

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.