Yesterday, I was looking to grab some dinner and a cache. Grabbing a cache often involves a little more driving nowadays than it used to. I have long since gotten all the low-hanging fruit in Austin, Round Rock, Pflugerville, and Georgetown, so I either have to go for something more difficult or go out to the edges of the county and the surrounding areas. That’s not usually a big deal for me, so it’s not strange for me to go twenty miles (though rarely more) out of town for one. But I didn’t feel like making that drive if I didn’t have to. I started to peruse the map, searching out possibilities. A bunch of pole-requiring tree hides have been appearing lately, but I’ve been avoiding those because the CO is renowned for his especially difficult hides and because I’m always at a disadvantage trying to find anything hidden in a tree. Instead, with a bunch of Mysteries sitting around me on the map, I opted to find a challenge.
A while back, friend of the site Buckandi hid a challenge series based on increasing levels of Project-GC challenge difficulty. For those unfamiliar with it, once a checker is created for a challenge cache, the site generates a difficulty rating ranging from 1 to 100, based on the number of regional, national, and world cachers who qualify for it and how often it’s found. For his series, he placed challenges with ratings inside certain difficulty ranges: one rated between 0 and 10, one between 10 and 20, one between 20 and 30 … all the way to 90–100. I’d grabbed a couple of the lower-rated ones already, but the higher-rated ones proved elusive. But I came upon one that seemed really close, a challenge to find Virtuals in thirty states or provinces. I did some quick mental math and realized it was, in fact, possible. I ran the checker, and—lo and behold—I had already done it! I had gotten the last one I needed back in Rawlins! Heck, a few of them I had gotten with Buckandi himself! It was easy enough to pull up GZ and then inveni, inscripsi, and reposui. Once I logged it, I set off to acquire food (nigiri and cinnamon rolls, if you must know).
For a long time, I avoided challenge caches. Early on, I couldn’t conceive of ever completing such ludicrous tasks. I thought, How does someone who’s not insane find five hundred Traditionals? Or find a hundred caches in a month? Or find them in seventy counties? And yet, I’ve managed to do all those things over the years. At this point, they seem almost laughably easy. Of course, I still have to remain humble. I haven’t found a hundred caches in each of ten different states. Or found a hundred EarthCaches. Or found a cache in every state containing part of the Louisiana Purchase. But give me time!
Geocaching While Black 