778. Ellicott City, Howard County (MD03)

Oh God. It hurt me to look at this. I’m not going to say that this is the worst courthouse I’ve ever seen, but it is certainly at the bottom end of mediocre. Actually, I take that back. I wouldn’t even call it that. The bottom limit of mediocre ascends as this one slides into just plain bad. I’ve seen brutalist courthouses that look more interesting than this. Do better, Howard County. Do better.

Razorbckgirl, Godot, and I soon turned off into Patapsco Valley State Park. After a bit of lunch and waiting for the others to catch up (they lunched elsewhere), we all set off for a special cache. We headed off onto a wet and muddy trail. Thinking that the cache would be about five hundred feet away, it turned out that it was five hundred feet down a hillside that required a mile and a half of switch-backing trails to descend without surrendering to gravity in the worst way. We forked off on a path that turned out to be the wrong way, making our difficult trek much harder.

We ended up walking along the Patapsco River and finding a train tunnel, but when we rechecked the cache location, we were a hundred feet below it. We climbed back up the hillside with no trails to follow, through 9,000 percent humidity, damply climbing in thorny vines and lichen-covered rock. We managed to find our way back to another path, which, though blocked by fallen trees, led back to GZ. We began to scamper around in boulders, and after much sweating, we finally found our quarry.

Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify—I don’t mean to be gender assumptive), I give you Jusef’s Cache, the oldest cache in Maryland! We signed our names and left our marks. As always, we cachers found the hard way in and the easy way out. The path that brought us through the final portion turned out to be part of the path system we had walked down in the first place, but trees and grasses had fallen over the place where we were previously misdirected, making it look impassible. The fight against gravity to return to the cars was as exhausting as the descent had been, but at least it was a little bit shorter. We relished air conditioning for a little while and gulped down water. We had earned our hydration with perspiration. Soon, after we had been refreshed, proud of our accomplishment and still in good spirits regarding our new adventure, we set off again, headed for…