Two Birds, One Stone

A couple of days ago, a series of challenge caches dropped, planted by the one and only Buckandi. They were interesting in that he placed them based on challenge difficulty. For those of you who do not spend a lot of time with Project-GC (if you like numbers, you should), one of the many things it can track is challenge difficulty, a number based on how many cachers statewide, regionally, and worldwide qualify, along with how frequently it is found. This generates a number ranging from 0 to 100 that is displayed along with the challenge checker. The higher the number, the more difficult the challenge theoretically is. I don’t entirely agree with their assessments, though. While I understand the rubric, I cannot accept that the Texas County Challenge (with 254 counties) is only slightly more difficult than New Mexico (33 counties) and significantly less difficult than Louisiana (64 parishes). I cede Alaska, however.

So anyway, Buckandi placed ten challenges, each one within a different difficulty range (0-9, 10-19, all the way to 90-99). Most of them I qualified for, though a few were beyond me. More importantly, I realized that I hadn’t found a cache yet that day. I also hadn’t gotten an FTF yet this month, either. I don’t normally feel the urge to chase an FTF, but they had only been available for an hour and were only twenty minutes away. I decided, why not? and hopped in the car. I made my way across town to a wealthier neighborhood and, after a few turns, stopped near a corner across from some condos. It didn’t take much searching to find the DNA tube containing a magnet. I snagged it, took the tweezers out of my pocket, and pulled out the blank and unadulterated log. A few moments and some fresh ink later, I accomplished my goal for both the day and the month. I replaced it and began to swagger back to my car when I saw a familiar jeep pull around the corner to arrive at the same location. It was our local FTF hound and find champion HiDude_98! He had started at one end of the row of new challenges and was working his way down. He had gotten a little over half of them at that point (I have no doubt he qualifies for all of them), but this one was the first FTF he hadn’t gotten that evening. I let him know that he had no more competition from me. I had my cache of the day and my FTF of the month. While I would return for the others some other day, I didn’t need to be first on all of them. I was good.