Shelby Farms - 1/15/2011

I got a call from jbgreer asking me if I wanted to geocache on Saturday. Our primary goal would be to hunt Flip Dizzy - Flip Out by Abiectio (GC1CW22). This cache is the final of a seven cache adventure series that involves a lot of puzzle-solving and hiking in really cool areas within Memphis and Shelby County, TN. We had started this series in September of 2008 with Flip Dizzy by Abiectio (GC18M8X). Because we were trying to complete this series with little to no assistance from others, it took us a while. Both of us had to solve the individual puzzles before we would go after the respective caches.

After having a delicious breakfast at one of my favorite eating spots, we made the drive to Shelby Farms.

Once we entered the woods, we began our quest. Even though you can get some spoiler information about this hunt by reading others' online logs, I will try to minimize my contribution to the spoilers. I will say that we hiked - a lot. We spent a lot of time on nice trails. There was still a little snow out, and some spots were slippery. We saw lots of runners and bikers while on our journey. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of things. We found the cache itself in good shape.

[ a beautiful spot ]

[ the trails were relatively snow-free ]

[ one of two armadillos we spotted ]

[ remnants of an old railroad bridge ? ]

The Greenline Experience

One of the caches we went after while in the area was Greenline - #1 by giardia_boy (GC2EQ10). It was in the vicinity of the old railroad bridge that crosses the Wolf River.

I knew that the trail we were on would lead us under the greenline and was not sure how we were going to get up on the bridge. There used to be a makeshift ladder formed from railroad spikes hammered into the bridge pilings, but I knew that these were gone.

After crossing under the bridge, we simply walked along the side trail a good distance until we found an entry point.

Once we got up to the paved trail, made our way back to where the cache was located. There were lots of people biking, walking, and running along the greenline. Fortunately there were occasional gaps of time where we could do what was needed to get our hands on the cache.

While in the general area of the greenline, we also hunted BLUE TRAIL??? by Hoot Owl (GC24VA8). The name of the cache also denotes the name of the trail we took to get to it. Amazingly, the last 200 feet of that hunt was the most difficult terrain we passed through all day. The container for this cache was an ammo can that was once part of spencersb's Dark Tower Series.

When we got back to the truck, we observed that we had hiked a total of 8.35 miles. We had a little bit of time left, so we took a shot at finding I Spy - Shelby Farms by giardia_boy (GC2C7Y1). This cache involved figuring out the coordinates of objects in two photographs taken amongst the 3500 acres of Shelby Farms, and using some distance information linked to each picture to compute a third location. This location was stage 1 of a 2 stage hunt. The sign at stage 1 had the coordinates on it for the final stage. I had done all of the calculations the night before and it turned out that I had correctly figured out where stage 1 was. After that, it was simply a matter of traveling to stage 2 and making the find. This was a creative design and if I hadn't known the relative locations of both objects, it would have been tough to work out the coordinates for stage 1.

We did some recon on a couple of other caches in the area before leaving for the day.