#Geocache365: Week 7 - September 20th-26th

Monday: Day 43 - Going back to correct a DNF. Success!!

Kris: A little bit of a swampy walk off the trail but nothing horrible. Surprised we didn't find it the first time, must have been shoved in a little too far last time we were here. Lots of those sticky bushes to dodge on the walk in and out and the mosquitos are bad!  Mark: Recently we DNF'd this cache while we were doing the Golden Valley History cache. Not one of my favorite types of caches to begin with.  The mosquitos were vicious and distracting all at the same time. We originally spent about 10-15 minutes looking for this one before calling it quits. This afternoon, we approached from the other side of the "bridge" and I had the cache in hand in under a minute. Sometime the environment can be distracting enough to cause a DNF.

Tuesday: Day 44 - 1st time we spent 30 minutes without finding it, 2nd time we found it in less than 5 minutes.

Kris: Another one I couldn't figure out how we didn't see it the first time.  Very busy stairwell with lots of metal so our minds both went to look for something magnetic.  Problem here is you can get to GZ and not know which level to look on.  Mark: Looks like we are starting the week by cleaning up a few DNF's. This cache was one of the puzzles originally included in the Cup of Joe puzzles edition where they provided the answers to about 40-50 puzzles. That CoJ event was over two years ago and to this day you will often hear cachers talking about it and asking if you have the solutions packet. I have held onto my packet knowing that eventually I would go back and grab all of the remaining available caches. This was our second attempt, the first time we spent more than 30 minutes looking and it was after dark, which may have been a factor, but this time in the daylight I walked right up and grabbed it almost immediately.

Wednesday: Day 45 - Grabbing a quick cache at lunchtime, trying to beat the dark clouds on the horizon

Kris: Fairly simple grab once we got positioned in the right parking lot.  Luckily there weren't too many people outside on their lunch break or it may have been a bit more challenging to get to the cache and not look suspicious.  Mark: Running errands and grabbing a cache has become a common occurrence since we started the 365 challenge. We know there was a forecast for a lot of rain this afternoon/evening (which turns out was an understatement, this was the day that all of the flooding rains fell on southern Minnesota) so we decided to get our cache find out of the way before it started raining.  But as you can see the clouds were on the horizon.

Thursday: Day 46 - A Red Herring! No. A Yellow Herring. No. A Yellow Duck???

Kris:  Love this one!  Not only did we fall for the cute trick left by the cache hider but the actual hide is one of my favorites so once I was re-directed I got it right away.  Pulled up to GZ and we had to choose between a couple medium sized trees and a lamppost.  Where would you look first?  Mark: Now this was fun and one of those occasion when finding a cache leads you to something completely unrelated but makes you smile. Pulled up to the cache coordinate and I quickly had a container in my hand, but to my surprise it was not that easy. The cache hider had placed a red herring in the OBVIOUS beacon and it simply stated "You didn't really think we'd place the cache in a lamp post did you? This is not the the cache, please try again, thanks for visiting..." I even took a picture of the note and container intending that to be our picture for the day but after finding the real cache, about 20 feet away we saw a much more appropriate picture.  Because our #Geocache365 is more about our experiences while finding a cache every day, who can resist a giant inflatable rubber duck?

Friday: Day 47 - One of these things is not like the other...

Kris: Ah, another one of my favorites.  An easy grab for me as this type of hide sticks out to me.  One of my first finds was of this type and I thought it was the most creative thing ever!  Beautiful little spot with the creek flowing through and not too much traffic driving by.  Mark: Our first attempt at a cache for today was a lot of fun but unfortunately the cache itself was missing so we had to fall back and find another cache nearby to go look for. We pulled up and were looking for about a minute when Kris said found it, and she was surprised that I had missed it, and so was I as this is one of my favorite types of caches and based on GZ I should have known to be looking for it. It is funny how much a cache like this stands out after you find it but if you don't know it is there you would never see it even though it is right out in the open.

Saturday: Day 48 - When worlds collide. Trail running meets geocaching. Birkie Trail Run 2010

Kris: A gorgeous place for geocaching!  A quick, quiet walk down the ski trail and a few feet off into the brush.   Pretty typical forest hide since this is an area where I don't think many people get off the trail. Mark: After finishing the Birkie Trail Half Marathon we drove back to the start line to find our cache for the day. How appropriate that our cache was right near the starting line and we actually ran within 30 feet of the cache when the race started. A beautiful day and the colors were amazing as you can see in the pic. 

Sunday: Day 49 - Shameless Plug :) "Skol Vikings, Let's win this game"

Kris:  Figured a good downtown cache would be good for us today.  Picked one quite a ways out from the stadium so muggle traffic wasn't too heavy.  GPS wasn't locking us in to one spot but knowing the size of the container it narrowed us down to just a couple of obvious beacons. Mark: Yes, I know that was a shameless plug, but they did win (Kris: barely!). Kris and I have been parking in her work parking lot and then walking about 1 1/2 miles to the dome for the game, which of course gives us an opportunity to look for a cache on our way. We had to spend quite a bit of time looking for this one as there was not many places to hide a cache at GZ and it eventually required a hand search of every nook and cranny and then I ran my fingers over it and it popped of out it hiding spot and fell to the ground. When I put it back I was shocked that I did not see it at all before finding it. Off to the game!! Go Vikes!

Southeastern MN caching day trip

Kris: Last Sunday was what we dedicated as our FREE day as we haven't had an entire day to do whatever we wanted to in a long time.  So of course....we slept in and took off driving south to go geocaching all day.  Our intention was to drive STRAIGHT (Mark: Straight if I would have taken 52 and not 35W, adding at least 45 minutes to our drive time) down to the two state parks we wanted to pick up for the day and then spend the rest of the day caching our way home.  But about 3/4 of the way down there we spotted this really cute little road with an old bridge and stream running through it.  (shiny object!!) So we turned around and spent a few minutes exploring and taking pictures.

The first park we got to was John A Latsch and it's a super small park.  We got the Safari multi in probably less than 2 minutes and then we were after the other cache in the park that supposedly had a coin in it.  But walking past this sign, I was wondering what we were in for.....

591 old wooden stairs later, we were at the top of this climb with very tired legs but had a great view over the river.  Another couple came up and took our picture for us.   She said "kiss him!"...so I did ;)

The cache was a short hike past the viewing spot but easy to find as it was called "Timberrrr!" and was a regular.   Not sure how great a muggle would feel accidentally stumbling across this ammo can in the woods.

  

Explosive is maybe a bit scary......

Once we finished up here we got a few quick caches and got distracted by a few that hadn't been found in a long time.   The first one was a multi that took Mark's poor Ford Focus onto roads built for a Jeep.   

When picking up the final stage way up in this remote area, sure enough a muggle comes by on a 4-wheeler.  There we are probably looking all suspicous and he asks "you two seen any other people around up in here?  We've had troubles with people setting fires"   Then (it gets better...)  The guy mentions some cool caves just up the road.  Not really pointing at the road on the left or the right, we decide to see if they are up the road on the left (wrong!!!)  As the road narrows and becomes increasingly hard to navigate much less turn around I notice we pass a "Private Property, No Trespassing" sign.   Having no where to turn around we keep going up (and I keep waiting to hear a shotgun) find a place to turn around by this house and make our way back down.   Sure enough, we meet up with this old truck with two older gentlemen and a dog.   We stop as we were passing each other and he gives an interesting grin...."Whatcha doin' up here?"  Sigh....I figured geocaching was a bad answer so we went with playing dumb, didn't see the sign, someone said something about caves and we couldn't find a place for our little city car to turn around.  Great!!  I'm waiting to be summoned to court for either starting forest fires or trespassing.

Once that fun was over, we noticed another cache with a relatively high difficulty rating that also hadn't been found in awhile and had a coin in it. Mark: We had juts gotten done finding a graveyard cache, one of Kris' favoties when we noticed this other high difficulty cache and were debating about trying to grab it or not when Kris mentioned that most likely the coin was still in the cache so I turned the car around and we headed to where the description talked about parking, As we drove to the parking spot we got to within .1 miles of the cache, remember that as I continue to tell this story. So we park and head up the trail, which turned out to be a ATV trail, kind of rough in a few places but plenty wide. (The picture below gives you an idea of what the trail was like) So we started our hike and it was not to long before we were passed by a family out on their ATV's, we let them go by and continued on our way. We walked for quite a ways and during that time I kept asking how far, .25 miles, then it was .3 miles and everytime I asked, Kris kept telling me I don't want to know. As we were approcing a final bend, hopefully back twords the cache we were passed by a second group on ATV's this time there was about 8 or so, OK this is their trail after all. So we get to the bend in the trail and finally we start heading towards the cache, as it turns out we ended more then a half mile from the cache before we actulley started getting closer. Eventually we got to GZ and made the find VERY quickly, not to hard considering it was an ammo can leaned up aginst a tree trunk. We still had to be stealthy as the ATV'ers were still up here at the lookout at the end of the trail. Unfortunally as we opend the cache and investigated we saw that the coin was missing, the coin sleeve (with the tracking #) was still in the cache and there was a entry in the log dated with todays date, "found while peeing, this is my first geocache." One of the ATV'ers found the cache stole the coin and signed the log. Sigh..... All that way and the coin was gone, that was the main reason why we decided to try for this cache, and it had not been found for months prior to this day. We were so close, remeber me mentioning being .1 miles from the cache. Since then I have checked on Geocaching.com and no one else had logged a find or logged the coin, so even though they signed the cache and replaced it, it was muggled.

Weird you can't really tell from this picture if we are looking up or down hill :)

We were definitely getting tired by this point but had to pick up Frontenac State Park so we scooted over there pretty quickly, got our passport stamp, safari cache and then headed out for a nice quick 2.5ish mile trail run to pick up the Hiking Club word.   Very pretty park with some steep terrain on the trails

Kris heading up a long a-- hill

All in all we ended up getting a little TOO distracted by caches that took a long time so we didn't get a high number of finds this day but it was quite the adventure.  3 multis, 4 traditionals, 2 earthcaches and 1 virtual.

Next adventure (tomorrow) we are heading down to Otak 2010 GeoFest - Bike, Hike, & Crawl in Mankato.  Bringing the mountain bikes along for the caching part and then hopefully will have time for a nice run as well. 

Quick update from the road

Kris: Been spending days if not weeks feeling guilty on how far behind our blog is. But I'm not going to fill in the gap right now, just merely fill you in on today.

Weather has been beautiful although today is a little cooler in the 50s right now but the sun is shining and should get to the mid 60s

Headed to REI right now to pick up another compass Mark ordered and see if we can use our 20% coupons on anything. Then it's down to Burnsville for a regular Orienteering event. Without the snow these are much more fun :). And we've been getting the hang of map/terrain reading. Plus we figure this is great practice for MOGA ( geocaching mega event) that we are headed to next weekend in Missouri

Probably not enough time to geocache today since we have to do the event, run 6 miles and then get cleaned up for dinner with Mark's family tonight

Here's my attempt at taking a photo one handed. I look all serious but hey, it's a pic from today :-P



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Location:Eden Prairie,United States

Obsess much?

Kris: So a quick report. We picked up the Myre Big Island park and our first 25 mile Hiking patch.

Mark: Lets give a little more credit to this park, drove around like a madman to all the different stages of the Safari cache and then about a mile trail run to the final. And we got lucky again with the Hiking club word on the trail to the cache. Saved us about half of the total distance.

Kris: We were hoping to get two other parks but thanks to the stupid sun going down at 5pm these days we made only one... Barely...

We reached Rice Park as the sun was going down but was determined to get the cache and the Hike. Mark was irritated by this truck who blocked the road not knowing how a 4-way intersection works, Didnt they know we were in a hurry? :-P We were running around through the cache stages and made the grab. It was now too dark to see my feet. So we grabbed the flashlights and took off down the trail. I thunk I stubbed my toe about 5 or so times bur luckily no face-plants.

Found the word pretty quickly, with another educated guess on where the post the word on the trail, after finding the word we walked through a boy scout troop camping and left the park to head for home. Made it back into Owatonna on fumes. 2miles to empty

But now I am typing as we are waiting for our buffalo chicken strips at Perkins. Mark is updating his Facebook



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Morning mud bath

Kris: Here is how our day looked when we started our day in Iowa. Foggy and cool



But we had a blast doing our first trail run together down in Des Moines Iowa for Living History Farms. Thanks to cousin Eric for putting us up for the night. What a blast! Trees, water, hills, ropes, holes and MUD!!!









To read more of our personal accounts of the race, check out our individual blogs on the right.

Had some awesome beef stew for the post race food and now we are off to get cleaned up and cache our way home.

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DAM cache at Wild River and Interstate Hike

Kris: We decided to go straight to Wild River and come back to Interstate since we needed to get there while the office was still open to borrow another GPS. Here's a rundown of our quick jaunt at Wild River -

2:20 Get to Trail Center and spend 15 minutes in line just to borrow out the GPS
2:45 Park down at the Trail Center and jog over to Stage 1 of the Safari cache
2:50 Get the Safari cache and think we have plenty of time to go get the DAM cache
3:05 Get to DAM cache site and can't grab the DAM cache because there are bikers on the overlook
3:10 I get somewhat impatient and casually walk a small trail to sneak a peek under the overlook and spy the DAM cache.
3:15 More people come to hangout on the overlook and so we sit on the bench, trying to be casual until they leave
3:17 Four scruffy looking hikers decide to put down their packs and grab a snack right outside the overlook area. No way I can get the DAM cache with them standing in view.
3:18 Mark and I try to figure out why the hell this park is so much busier than every other park we've been at...
3:20 People on the overlook finally leave. I start giving the hikers the evil eye hoping they will leave

3:23 I get impatient for the hikers to leave. I casually pretend to check out another foot trail along the other side of the overlook and crawl hands and knees up and under the overlook to grab the DAM cache. As I'm signing the DAM cache, Mark informs me more (friggin') people are walking our way.

3:25 I get the DAM cache put back in it's damn spot and we start our run back to the trail center.

Mark: DAM she is good!!

3:50 Get back to Trail Center and grab the history cache. Most expensive container I've seen!

3:58 Just make it back in time to return the GPS as the park lady was turning out the lights.

Mark: Unfortunately we still have to come back to Wild River State Park to complete their BIG Multistage History I Puzzle Cache. The cache in the picture gave us coordimnates to the 6 differant stage areas where we have to figure out clues. In the end it should be worth it, they are handing out a Pathtag to everyone who solves the puzzle. Bling Bling!!

Phew! Now all we had to go was get over to Interstate park in time to run the hiking trail and find the Club word. It was a very rocky trail but very pretty scenery going along the river.

Luckily the word was only about 1/2 mile down the 1 1/2 mile trail so we got that in time to hike/run back and take a few pictures on the overlooks and in the pothole area.

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2 down 2 to go

Kris: Picked up the Boom site cache with a little extra searching. Mark: A lot of extra searching.... spent way to much time searching for this one. We didn't have our GPS (loaned out for the day) and were trying to find it with just our iPhones. Ok that kind of sucked...note to others, use Google.com via Safari and not the Maps Application (Maps tries to find the closest address from GPS coords, Google.com in Safari show you the actual location) to pinpoint coordinates. Stepped out the depth of the earth cache at Boom Island and then headed out to William O'Brien.

Mark: What Kris failed to mention is that figuring out how deep the cave was was not one of the requirements, I need to read more carefully.

Long trail run here to a tradational cache and the Hiking Club word. Luckily we did the hike trail in reverse and found it a much shorter distance from the car. It was a very hilly run/walk up to where there was a cache placed (this park office had GPS units you could borrow) but we made the grab and headed back, in total about a 3.6 mile trail run.

Along the way I found a nice place to rest.

We needed to hurry out of here to make it to Wild River State Park before their office closed, need to borrow another GPS, and then then back to Interstate State Park before dark so we can get the Hiking club word and be done for the day and with the State Park along the St. Croix river.


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Mille Lacs Kathio - Check!

Kris: well I think we just did everything Mille Lacs Kathio State Park has to offer except camp

Picked up the park caches...




CHECK

Mark: This one was very nicely hidden. And during our jog to the final cache we ran through a planted row pine forest, you know the type, with all of the trees in a line and the ground soft with their needles, and if you are really lucky like we were, you get to listen to the wind through the pine trees. One of my favorite sounds! I took this picture which really gave a great feel for what I am talking about.

Redeemed our 10 critter coin and card and wild card patch...

CHECK

Got our Passport stamp...

CHECK

Ran the Hiking Club trail to get the park password. ( which might I add gave me a new appreciation for trail runners)....

CHECK

And climbed up 145 steep steps of the observation tower

CHECK :)

Mark: Kris highlighted it in the photo but from the tower you could see the bright lights of Grand Casino Mille Lacs and the huge expanse of Lake Mille Lacs in the background.

Headed home by way of Embers for dinner. Another fun day, wishing tomorrow wasn't Monday


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Another great day for caching - Mille Lacs

We just made it up to our caching destination for today. One of what might be the last super nice days of the season. We just picked up a few caches in Isle, MN


Now off into Father Henn State Park for the Safari hide and some trail running to pick up the Hiking Club word.



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