Shelby Farms - February 23, 2008

I had been making plans to cache in West Memphis this weekend. Early in the week I received an e-mail from my buddy jbgreer wanting to know if I wanted to go caching with him this coming Saturday. Of course I did so I came up with a list of good caches (in terms of difficulty and terrain) that was closer to his house and arranged to meet him at his house around 7:30am. I didn't tell him beforehand exactly what caches we would be hunting and just mentioned we would be revisiting his favorite railroad bridge.

Saturday morning came and as been usual for me the past few months, I had some trouble leaving on time. When I arrived at jbgreer's house (15 minutes late), he had his truck warmed up and ready to go. I showed the maps of caches I had plotted out and told him our first cache of the day would be RUSTY RAILS-ROTTEN LUMBER V 2.0 by psychicash (GC15HAB). Our initial plan was to do the easiest (least complicated) caches first and work up to the harder ones.

Before hunting our first cache, we had to tackle "the bridge".


Making it across safely, we quickly found the first cache and jbgreer did the legwork of retrieving the container. I had been worried that the previous day's rain would cause problems, but we had none.

On to the second cache, Rusty Rails: Phone Call by Nvisible & PsychicAsh (GC15NMF). It was also a quick find, even though the namesake landmark blended in well with the surroundings. I took a picture here, but it is a spoiler. Now, with the easier caches under our belts, we were ready to tackle the tougher ones.

We were closest to THE 385 CACHE by MagicRock (GC1918C), so we decided to give that one a shot. I knew it required special equipment, but wasn't sure what I needed. The previous finder's overly verbose log provided a spoiler that came in handy. We did manage to find what the spoiler referred to (thanks) and realized we would probably need to come back later with a specific item. I don't think I have ever found a MagicRock cache on the first try.

Next, we headed to Riding the Rusty Railroad by Nvisible (GC1130Z). This is a 4-stage cache that required some advance work before attempting. I did the work for stage 1 the night before. Unfortunately we had no luck with this one (the logs were no help) and since I don't care for the phone-a-friend approach (p-a-f is for the weak ;-) ), we decided to move on and try this one again later.

We doubled back and headed for The Frank Stockton Cache by psychicash (GC15H9C). This cache has a "key" that is necessary to decode the coordinates for two other nearby caches. I did a lot of work the night before to make sure this would not be a problem and when we found the cache, we made quick work of decoding the coords for The Lady... by psychicash (GC15HA3) and ...or The Tiger? by psychicash (GC15HA5) and found these two caches on our way back to the tracks. Since we had some time, we made one more unsuccessful attempt at Riding the Rusty Railroad by Nvisible (GC1130Z) before making our way back to the truck. We were pretty happy to find 5 of the 7 area caches and plan to try the others on another day.


We got back to the truck around 10:15am and I showed jbgreer a map of the next area that I figured we could go after. He agreed and we headed over to the south part of Shelby Farms.

Our next find was Keep In Touch by cgeek (GCZQWD). We found it easily enough after some walking, but somehow on the way out, I managed to seriously rip the right leg of my pants on a metal fencepost while stepping over a short fence. When we got to the next cache area, I fixed my pants with a couple of strips of duct tape from a roll that jbgreer had. For CARS! by jackthebear (GC18310), we parked on the wrong side of a small creek, so we had to walk around. Given the location of the cache, it was surprising that I spotted it so quickly. I enjoy these types of hides because they make me feel like a kid!

It was around lunchtime at this point so we headed to Chick-Fil-A for a good meal. Caching is much more relaxing when you stop for lunch.

We had three more caches on our list so we drove back to Shelby Farms and parked near the equestrian area. We hadn't cached over here for a while so we didn't remember much about the excellent trail system back here. Our first goal was 1st and 21 by savvysteve (GC16JC5). This cache was nicely tucked away and actually had some neat stuff in it (being a fairly new cache). We then headed west to tackle Bluey by tkollig (GC19AH7) and Hard by tkollig (GC19AHK), our last finds of the day. Both caches were easy finds, but you could run into serious thorns if you don't take the right approach. We had a nice hike back to the truck and I was glad the weather was fairly cool. On our way out of the area, we stopped at Wal-Mart so I could get some new pants. We then drove back to jbgreer's house where we parted ways around 2:45pm.

All-in-all we had a pretty good day. Our total find count for the day was 10. No lightpoles or guard rails to disappoint us and no muggles to deal with. My next few trips might be done solo, but I always have a great time caching with jbgreer.