A Tale Of Two Caches

I was out having a stroll and finding a cache the other day. There is a very large and popular greenbelt in Austin that has a whole bunch of caches in it, enough that there’s actually a challenge devoted to finding ones in this specific greenbelt (there’s around 60 or so). I decided to have breakfast with a friend and then go for a walk along the trail and grab one. It’s an older cache so it may have been a Jasmer filler, but I’m not sure and that’s not even salient anyway. I walk over close to the GZ, which leads me to a fallen tree up a low, rocky slope. I check the hint (some people say that real cachers don’t use hints. I tell those people that they can shut their pie holes) and it mentions roots, which makes me think that tree may be salient to the finding. I walk/climb up to the base of the fallen tree to find…

…a plastic jar under a rock. Hardly camoflaged or hidden or something similar, no? I cracked it open and there was a log with signatures from at least 2008 to modern day. Hardly of note or worthy of entry into these hallowed pages or, really even, my attention. I pulled it out to sign and started cracking it open when my geosenses noticed something in the rocks next to me…

…an ammo can in the rocks, something more like what I expected to find (and by “more like,” I mean “exactly like”). I cracked it open. It has the original log from when it was placed in 2004 and signatures going all the way up to the present day. So how did this happen? Why would there be two containers at the same location? It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve seen it. In fact, somewhere in the archive I have an entry about that. But in those cases, they were small and/or relatively insubstantial containers and I could easily understand how one might not be found for a while and thought lost. But these two? The jar is in exactly the right place but isn’t actually the right cache. The ammo can is the right cache and it’s no more than 15 feet off so it’s hardly in the wrong place. People have been finding both of them and signing both of them forever. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Does it really even matter? I know it doesn’t in the greater scheme of things, but it matters to me (sort of)! Obviously I shot a message to the owner (who, coincidentally, just finished the Texas County Challenge himself ), but I assume he must know about it by this point. I’m just baffled how someone could decide to have a second container when the first is not only there but serviceable and more robust. Of course, these are the things I think about. Don’t we all? Either way, my duty done and things signed, I dropped a trackable in the ammo can, and got back on the way. There will be other days down here. I shall return…