How Do I Get One?

It’s rare these days I find myself in truly urban forest.  I have a tendency to stick to park lands when I “rough it” lately, mostly because I’m getting farther and farther out for my daily caches so I’m seeing more suburban and semi-rural.  But since I’m sticking closer to town thanks to car repairs, I’ve seen a few places I haven’t been before because they would have been inconvenient to park near.  This is how I found myself walking a clear cut in the middle of north Austin.  It was bordering on a well fenced and secure private school who probably preserved it both because of the creek (or rather creekbed) that ran through it and as a noise break from the nearby highway.  I knew there was a cache in there, but didn’t intend on going after it until I happened upon the cut and decided Why not?  At the end of the cut was a clearing and the cache was just off of it so it was easy enough to find, but, since I didn’t pay close attention on the walk there, I ended up taking rough way out through thorny vines and crap instead of one of the paved sewer covering paths I had passed on the way there.  What mattered, though, was the cache itself.

When I reached GZ, I began looking up in the trees, thinking it was suspended somewhere.  I then remembered that I never read the description or the hint (yes, I have zero qualms about looking at hints if you didn’t already know that).  I took a moment to read them, saw the “low” hint, and resumed my search.  That’s when I caught view of a city water access pipe.  This, of course, struck me as odd because it was too far back in the growth for the trees to be that tall around it (someone would have had to dig it all upat some point to lay the pipe, no?).  I picked up the iron cover and find a keybox stuck to it.  I’m not going to lie: if this had been closer to a building or even in the middle of the clear cut, I wouldn’t have suspected it.  Where the heck did the CO find this thing?  I have no doubt that we all stay on the lookout for interesting things from which to make containers.  At this point, I’m wondering if I should start investing in better tools for cutting PVC with as much of it as I have used for caches in the last year.  But an actual piece of city infrastructure?   I’m never lucky enough to find something like that that wouldn’t create deeper problems (I once considered “acquiring” something similar because I knew it wouldn’t inconvenience anyone, but ended up not doing it).  But now it’s got me thinking about whether the city works departments (Waste Water, or Transit and Public Works) has some sort of castoff clearinghouse or recycling program (or dump) for this kind of stuff.  Part of me says probably not or, if it is recycled, someone pays them for it.  But for something to make a container this good, I can make a few phone calls.