Yesterday, I chose a cache for a strange reason. I was looking for something easy to grab on a hot day after a long, tiring day at work, and I noticed an easy one that I didn’t remember seeing before. It was only about a week or two old. When I looked at the two logs it had, both from cachers I know, I noticed that one of them mentioned that when the restaurant reopened, it would be awkward to find the cache. What? I thought about that for a few minutes. I didn’t come up with any earth-shattering conclusions about it, but I did decide that the cache might not be long for this world, so I might as well get it while the getting was good. I went for a drive to the very edge of the city before entering a Cedar Park shopping center I had passed countless times before but paid no heed to because, for me, it was something between here and there, not a destination unto itself. It was easy enough to park and navigate through the buildings. I came across a large covered patio and saw the name on the door of a darkened restaurant. It was a longtime Austin establishment that closed a couple of years ago, and I had no clue they had another location so far out. After a quick read of the cache page and a quick glance around, I realized the cache was hidden on one of the support beams of the patio. The beam was supported by a pillar that I could have climbed up from the ground, but I was already tired and worn out. I borrowed a chair from an adjoining restaurant patio to use as a step. I went up to the cache, signed it, and Bob’s your uncle. I noted in my log, however, that the T1.5 for the cache might be a little low under the circumstances. I mean, it’s easily climbable (I wouldn’t have bothered with the chair on a different day), but it’s high enough that I couldn’t reach it from the ground (and I’m a six-foot dude). Once I logged it, I set off to grab some dinner before heading home.
Imagine my surprise to find that I had a message from the cache’s owner! He’s a very new cacher (with fewer than fifty finds). When he saw my log and find count, he wanted to get my opinion on what I thought the cache’s Terrain rating should be. I gave it to him straight: I thought it should be T2.5. Something high enough that you have to climb for it should be a T3, but this wasn’t very difficult, so I knocked it down half a point. It may not be that big a deal, but it was definitely not a T1.5 as advertised, and the change might serve as a warning for other (especially newer) cachers that it was something more than a park-and-grab or something. And he took my words to heart because later I saw that he had changed the rating.
I have on a few occasions said that you shouldn’t be afraid to reach out to another cacher for something, whether it’s information, hints, opinions, or a host of other things. But there’s a corollary to that as well: you’ve got to be receptive. When a newer cacher reaches out, you’ve got to make the time for them. When an more experienced cacher suggests something, you may want to consider it. No matter where you are in the caching hierarchy (I’m not entirely into hierarchical structures in caching, but it’s as good a word as any for the sake of the metaphor), you should take everyone seriously—the people above you, the people below you, and the people around you. That’s how wisdom is passed on from generation to generation. Or some kind of crap like that.
Geocaching While Black 