Regional Variation

My cache yesterday was nothing special; a bison tube hidden in a hole in a rock, karst to be specific. It was in the parking lot of a church, which was a bit different since one of my standing rules is that I don’t mess with a church on a Sunday. But the feelings of exasperation it brought up in me were unexpected. I am sick to death of finding caches in karst, not because I hate karst in and of itself (it is, along with granite and limestone, one of the basic building blocks of Texas’ terrain after all), but because I’ve poked around in karst holes so many times that I could almost vomit. But it is a regionally common hide type. I’m pretty sure it’s a contender for the title of “Texas-style,” but I can’t be entirely sure. Texas, being as big as it is, could probably support multiple sub-regional hide types (San Antonio-style is a tree hanger that needs a pole but I’m not aware of any others), but I don’t think there is one definite type. I know other places have hide styles (Florida-style is in the pockets of palm trees and I believe Georgia-style means obscured by pine needles). But it also started me wondering how a hide type gets common enough to be attached to a state like that. Using Texas again, East Texas is very different than West Texas or South Texas. It makes sense that there’s not a regional hide type ofor such an expensive area. Somewhere like Connecticut, on the other hand, is so small that the entire state is kind of the same (it’s the same size as Harris County!), but nobody is touting the annoyances of a Connecticut-style hide. I know that Arizona has deserts, but I doubt they can claim them exclusively; I’ve totally found a few in the deserts of Nevada outside of Las Vegas. I know New Jersey is defined by their hikes (if memory serves, the divide between northern and southern New Jersey cachers is that northern ones don’t think southern hikes are long enough), and I can only imagine that Hawaii is defined by the same holey rock crap as in Texas, only with volcanic rock.

In the end, I think this is really just over-intellectualizing my feeling: I’m sick of the karstiest karst that ever karsted a karst!