A CITO By Any Other Name

Once again, I and some of my caching friends were rolling around the back roads of Texas (specifically Bosque, Hamilton, and Erath Counties), finding caches on a power trail, some of which I had done several years back. However, we were out with a different goal in mind. The COs had decided earlier this year to archive the trail, and several of us had tentatively planned to work on it some more, so perennial planner The Outlaw reached out to the COs with a proposition: since they would have to come down here to clean up all the geotrash (something nobody likes to do), why don’t we do it for them? Their containers get picked up (in preparation for another trail they’re going to replace this one with), and we get the finds. It’s a win-win all around! So, on Saturday morning, I met up with The Outlaw. We drove up to Temple to pick up another cacher (FinderLea), met with a fourth cacher (Quarus) in Meridian, and then we hit the roads to adventure!

We gathered up containers of many types: pill bottles, DNA tubes, bisons, preforms (wired and loose) … We even had to pull out a metal detector to find staked ones buried beneath years of mud and foliage and the poles and ladders to find ones high in the trees. Luckily, a couple of us were climbers, which made a few of the grabs easier for us.

A couple of our roads led to water crossings. The Bosque River was just a little blue line on a map until we got to it. At almost any other time, the flow would be low enough to cross in our truck, but recent rains had made the waters swell. We had to backtrack a couple of times to get to the bridges, but the scenery was pretty.

Somebody once told me that an important part of geocaching is refreshing the board from time to time. And an equally important part is that we don’t want to leave our trash behind. We only got about 80 percent of the containers, some of which crumbled to dust in our hands, the plastic having been distressed by years under the Texas sun. But what mattered most (other than all the finds) was that we not only left the world a little better than we found it but also prepared the board for the next run of caches. We’ll be out that way again the next time, and we’ll know that we helped make that happen in our own way.