Easy As Pie?

Yesterday, I was looking at the map and trying to decide on my daily cache. I was looking at a part of town I rarely find myself in when I noticed a large cache that I hadn’t found before, located in a forested patch near a big-box home-improvement store. I thought it would be a nice change of pace, considering I was just complaining about micros in trees (and, by extension, similarly uninspired hides). I drove over to the store through intermittent rain, looked at the thickness of the wooded area, and decided to let it wait for another day. We frequently talk about bushwhacking, but this seemed a step beyond. After driving the perimeter, I couldn’t even see a way into it, and the cache is only rated as T2. Add in that it was still raining, and I realized I had zero drive to make the attempt. I redeployed to another nearby cache but then remembered why I don’t come to that part of town much. That area has recently been (dare I say) overpopulated with high D/T caches of questionable provenance and variety. I felt lucky to find one on the map that wasn’t insanely difficult. I’m not looking for a tree climb in the rain to find a DNA tube, especially when it’s so small it goes beyond nano-sized (we sometimes call them picos). And even if it hadn’t been raining, I do feel there is such a thing as oversaturating an area with hides so difficult that only the most hardcore cacher can find them. Two dozen caches rated D4/T4 and above being the only ones within a mile radius? No wonder I don’t find myself there often. Some days the challenge is nice, but so many so concentrated can be brutal. We all like to actually find things sometimes, right? I got a cache, though, so I’ll quit my bellyaching. Maybe I’ll go back out for that large on a day when it’s warmer and drier. If I come back to that area, that is.

Of course, I have no doubt you all read about HQ‘s new souvenir for finding a Mystery Cache on Pi Day weekend. As I am genetically predisposed toward liking pie (and pi), I approve. Considering that it also overlaps with this year’s Texas Challenge, odds are pretty good that I can manage to find at least one Mystery. I’m waiting for HQ to introduce a Tau Day souvenir, but even I concede that might be a little too niche.