848. Coalville, Summit County (UT08)

All right, Utah, make up your mind!  Do you have courthouses or administrative centers?  Can you explain the distinction?  Is there a distinction?  If they’re interchangeable, can’t you pick one and stick with it?  Does it really matter?  Other than to me, that is?  That said, this was the best that Utah thus far offered besides the capital.

I immediately went to the closest cache, which was both a joy and a mistake.  A block from the courthouse at city hall was a gadget Letterbox Hybrid with almost two hundred favorites.  The idea of doing it was fascinating, but I didn’t really feel like messing with it at midnight.  Besides, I was grabbing counties.  I didn’t have the time to go through all that trouble.  At least that’s what I thought.  If I had stayed and done it, it might have been faster than what actually happened. 

As always, I wanted to get something quick and easy so I could get going again, so my first attempt at a cache was at a nearby historical marker by the highway.  But when I got to ground zero, I began to experience that same eeriness and fear that I felt back in Morgan.  That’s when I figured out something about myself that I never really knew before. There’s something about mountainous terrain at night that gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I’ve done a lot of night caching, but it’s usually been in somewhat urban and suburban environments.  I’ve definitely stopped on some country roads in the middle of nowhere to grab things in the dark as well.  I’ve certainly been to mountaintops.  But there’s something about the looming cliffside at night and going up to a place I cannot see that disturbs me.  I also began to realize that I first felt that feeling driving the mountain road between Mora and Taos, but back then, I thought it was more of a claustrophobic reaction.  I can only imagine it’s similar to how some people feel freaked out by large bodies of water that they can’t see the other side of.  I would have had no qualms about finding this historically placed cache in the day, but at night, there was a dread that I just couldn’t shake off.  Back in Morgan, I found one close to a similar mountainside, but it was across the road, away from the side just enough to proverbially gird my loins and just do it.  This one, though?  I just couldn’t do it.  My second attempt at a cache fared little better.  It was listed as Terrain 2, but it was probably a T3.  Multiple logs mentioned that a TOTT (possibly a ladder or step stool) was required, even though there was no other indication from the description.  Since I was traveling in a rental car I hadn’t driven from home, I had nothing to fit the bill.  Ultimately, I found a simple cache at the foot of a sign between Coalville and a neighboring town.  I have sometimes found that there are not always easy caches in remote counties.  There was a definite dearth of them for a bit in Utah.  During the day, more of them would be fine, but at night?  Then again, maybe it was just me and my own personal foibles.  Either way, I had spent more than an hour in this little county.  That gadget probably would have been faster.  I left the county and the state as quickly as I could, making my way to…