Yesterday, I Sucked

A cache has been sitting on my map for years, one of the oldest mystery caches in the area. I had ventured toward it a couple of times in the past, only to realize that the closest way was not viable because of backyard fences. Still, it sat there on my map, taunting me. Yesterday, I decided that I was going to go after it. That turned out to be a horrible mistake.

I went to the park where it lay and started walking a trail toward it. It was a D1.5/T1.5, so I thought little of it. After a little while, the path got less defined. After a little while longer, there was barely even a trail anymore. It was definitely no longer T1.5. I got within one hundred feet of the cache and realized that I would have a giant bushwhack on my hands to get to it. I started looking at older logs and learned that there was another route. If I backtracked and followed the back fence line, I would come to it with a much shorter bushwhack. The good news was that that plan led to practically no bushwhack. The bad news was that I could find nothing resembling what I sought. I searched and searched. I spent about 45 minutes in almost hundred-degree heat looking for it to no avail, and it didn’t help that I was not dressed for it.

After sweating out all of my vital fluids, I decided to get some help. I knew a couple of people who had found it in recent years. However, by “recent,” I mean four to five. But they were my best choices because it hadn’t been found much since. Even the last finder in March stated that it was about twenty-five feet off from GZ and much closer to the backyard fences than expected. I phoned my first friend. He vaguely remembered the cache, but only vaguely. He could only remember that he had found it easily in a lot of low brush. I saw nothing close to that, possibly because of a Snowpocalypse in the intervening years. He was of no help. I phoned a second friend. He vaguely remembered the name, but couldn’t really remember the cache and, though kind enough to answer, was busy at the moment. He, also, was of no help. In the end, I decided that I had sweated enough. I went off to find the easiest cache I could possibly get so I could head home and put back all the water I had sweated out.