More Than I Expected

The Scorpion Expeditionary Force (SEF) and I had long been preparing for this past weekend. Its de facto leader had long ago told us that he, his wife, and another cacher had been working on a giant duck-themed Geoart to replace the many different and recently archived ones spread out over Williamson and Milam Counties. Indeed, if one goes back through archives, one will find a lot of entries about and mentions of those now-retired caches. For at least a couple of months, we’ve been providing old photos of cachers and gatherings to provide grist for the Jigidi* mill. We’d heard about the long days on the road placing new containers (and picking up old ones), the bleary eyes from creating cache pages, and the general level of exhaustion from all the other things involved. At least a couple of weeks before, scuttlebutt about it started getting out there on the grapevine, so when the weekend came, we had a pretty good inkling that it wouldn’t be just us here attacking this thing. Imagine my surprise when I finally made it to the rally point for the day.

There were many of the usual suspects from the area and the SEF (including friends of the blog Razorbackgirl and Buckandi). There was a contingent from San Antonio, including Thewildrosesoftexas, Huggles44, and 4everlyn. The Houston contingent was led by fellow TXGA board member MsPatt. The Dallas contingent included Paintballvet18 and KidWrangler of tractor pursuit fame; and notably TTO2, whose attendance brought a smattering of folks from out of state; including Georgia, Arizona, and, most unexpectedly, Mondou2 (yes, the cacher with the most finds on earth) from Colorado. Over four hundred caches dropped in the early morning and over a hundred more over the course of the day, totaling just shy of six hundred caches. Luckily, being on the ground floor of this endeavor, we didn’t have to solve all the puzzles (we’d still be working on that now). We uploaded GPX files with the corrected locations, and our mad scramble began.

I ended up rolling with friends and SEF members Tygress and Waterweasel as we, like some kind of land pirates, plowed the the back roads in search of treasures unknown to the hands of man. We found caches. We helped and were helped by other cachers at times. We ate carne seca and cheese. It being the first truly hot weekend in quite a while, we hydrated like nobody’s business. There were so many guardrails, posts, and trees, many of which I had seen before because I had found caches in the same locations during the lives of the previous Geoarts. Of course, our hosts, being people, were imperfect. A few caches were missing logs. A few caches were just plain missing. At least one cache, its solution coordinates mistyped, was about 300 feet off, in the middle of a private cornfield. But it all worked out. Logs were replaced. Containers were hung where they had once been with required adjustments (we’re pretty sure one of them was swallowed by a cow, so…). Coordinates were fixed. Much of the day was filled with sweat, dust, and sometimes chiggers. And then…

…the “Evil” hides dropped. One of the hosts is famed for his annoyingly evil placements and was tempered for the most part of the Geoart by the others. But about thirty of them were made to be truly rough. I personally only participated in two of those, but they were both ones that I knew I would never discover on my own. The first was a DNA tube attached to a short fake vine in a tangle of vines. Ten of us looking, all pros at this game, would probably never have found it were it not for the good luck that Tygress, besides being an artist, is almost intimately familiar with Texas flora. She caught that the leaf on the fake vine was not quite right and just a shade of green off from what it should have been. We knew the other one had already been found, so we knew the right friend to phone for a hint. It turned out to be a rusty nail head with a log twisted around it in underneath some barbed wire on an ancient fence post. I and several others chose that moment to call it a day. We had already been running around all day, and the idea of baking under the sun for who knew how much longer, looking for things more difficult to find than needles in haystacks (we all had magnets, so a needle would have been child’s play comparatively) did not appeal to us. As the truest of the true diehards sought out the “deeeep hurrrting” hides, we, along with many others, said our goodbyes, and went to get some barbeque. We had all done a yeoman’s work that day. It was time for some well-deserved rest.

_{* For those of you not on the bleeding edge of caching technology, Jigidi has become popular in the last couple of years for creating puzzles for Unknown caches.}