Since night caches are best done in groups, jbgreer took to the GOWT facebook group to find people who might be interested in accompanying us. I would have asked myself, but I appear to have been blocked by the group admin, a geocacher named Titansfan, after I caught him making disparaging and homophobic remarks about me on facebook. What a pathetic skunk. Anyways, back to the cache hunt...
We arrived at the parking area for the cache, which is in the Wolf River Wildlife Area around 6:30pm. Waiting for us were two geocachers that we met at an event two weeks ago - Balls2thefloorgeocacher and ProudMother06. There was another car there with kids apparently engaged in pot smoking.
[ Three excited members of the team. ]
It was a cold night, roughly 30 degrees. Perfect weather for hiking. We checked to make sure that we had everything we intended to take with us, marked a waypoint to the parking area and headed west down a dark gravel road. Eventually, we made it to a point where we needed to cut into the woods and make our way to the first tree with two retro-reflective tacks on it.
[ Can you say retro-reflective? ]
It was fairly easy to spot tacks on the trees along the path, even though it looked like (to me) that I was the only one with a good flashlight, and I was leading from behind. It didn't take long before we discovered that a lot of the ground was wet. I was wearing running shoes, because they were less painful than my waterproof boots. Once I got used to the fact that my feet were going to get wet, I relaxed and enjoyed the hunt. According the the cache page there were 46 single reflectors between the pairs that start and end this cache. It was too easy to lose count, so we hoped that we didn't miss any along the way.
[ There were lots of small streams along the way. ]
[ It was very dark. ]
[ Success! ]
We arrived at the cache exactly one hour after leaving the parking area. After signing the log, the real fun began. I was aware of our position relative to where we parked and believed that I knew the correct direction to head in order to get back onto the gravel road the soonest. However, navigating in the dark using electronic compasses, we somehow managed to head in a direction 180 degrees away from the correct way.
[ This is how you know you are going the wrong way. ]
After enjoying some sights that we normally would have missed going the right way, we decided to simply aim for the waypoint of the parking area and essentially go back the same way we came in. There were a few differences, though, in the path we followed. Going to the cache, we crossed three small creeks. On the way back we crossed a lot more. At one point after crossing the same creek multiple times, I shouted "WTF?" in frustration. We eventually made it back to the road and a short while later back to our vehicles and parted ways.
I'm glad that we had others with us, if only to share the misery of walking through ice-cold streams again and again!
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