South Arm Geocaching Stakeout -- Conclusion

Having obtained one of the Garmin Rinos from my dad, I returned to South Arm park for the third time to search for the errant Taylor's Cache. The accuracy stayed at around 5 meters while under the trees, as opposed to the 30 meters from the eTrex Vista I used my last two attempts. As expected, the device pointed me straight to GZ and after pushing aside some leaves with a stick, I found the cache.

The swag in the cache was nothing to get excited about. Amongst the crap inside the hidden garbage can was the plastic part of a eaten Ring Pop. Anyone young enough to be eating a Ring Pop probably didn't travel to and find this cache all by themselves, so a parent or guardian decided to drop that in. I left a few of the President's Choice meat and pork stickers which my friend--who grabs a few of the stickers while shopping with his family at Superstore--and I save for caches with poor swag. I'd like to have left something which better suited the quality of the swag in the cache, but couldn't find anything worse in my geocaching kit.

Replacing the cache was the real challenge. All of the trees look the same, and when I finished signing the logbook and replaced the lid, I realized I had no idea which tree the cache had come from. I made my best guess, and, knowing that no one's GPS would be perfect and point to an exact tree, the next seekers would be able to find it just fine.

I found kool11's name in the logbook, so I know she found the cache. That rules out the first of the three  scenarios I came up with in my last post, and since I ruled out the other two myself, I am now very confused. I have emailed kool11 asking some questions and I will update this post when/if she gets back to me. I'll also start a topic in the forums then. Continue to check back on this post for updates.

Kool11's name mocks me in the logbook.

South Arm Geocaching Stakeout

Geocaching is a fun scavenger hunt-based game using GPS technology. As you all know, this isn't a geocaching blog. I like blogging, and I like geocaching, but I don't cache quite enough to author my own blog about it. Even so, I went geocaching in South Arm park today, expecting another boring micro in a tree, as described by the cache listing. But then things got interesting. If this happened every time I went caching, I'd start a geocaching blog pretty quick.

This afternoon, I returned to South Arm park in pursuit of GC2ZKYQ, Taylor's Cache. I had found the nearby Chloe's Cache last Friday without event, and I was expecting more or less the same experience today. My dad was using his company's set of Garmin Rinos, so I was stuck with the eTrex Vista. Oh how I hate this device. I've never understood how people can stand caching with it at all. But today, my frustrations from the eTrex's lack of a high-sensitivity antenna were exacerbated under the heavy tree cover over Taylor's Cache. According to the description, Taylor is a four year old girl, so I wasn't expecting her to have used a high-sensitivity GPS device to take the coordinates. And, knowing that the best accuracy I could get under these trees was 30 meters, I realized that Taylor probably got the same and that with a 60 meter (MINIMUM!) circle to look for the cache in, this was going to be a very long day.

But all hope was not lost. The hint indicated the cache was in the base of a tree. There were a lot of trees in the area, but with a nearly 200 foot circle to be searching in, it still narrowed things down and the circle became more of an ellipse. That didn't mean this was going to be easy, or even the least bit pleasant. The eTrex was pointing all over the place--as it always does--so I didn't even know where the center of this 200 foot ellipse would be. So I walked to the center of the field and waited for the eTrex to find more satellites, hoping it would indicate a direction I could even start looking in. The accuracy finally went down to 6 meters and the arrow became steady. I walked in a straight line back to the trees, and started looking inside them.

The cache was, of course, not there. I said at the beginning of this post that this had been an interesting caching experience. Sulking about my lack of a high-sensitivity GPS and walking across a field was not an interesting caching experience. So as I reached dead end after dead end after investigating every lead, I decided to call it.

Disappointment was the last thing on my mind as I began to return to the path to leave the park. Even on my way into the park I hadn't expected to find the cache. We (geocachers) all try to be optimistic when we arrive at GZ. But if I hadn't found it the last time I was here (after searching for Chloe's Cache last time), why was I about to find it now? As Zack Martin once said, "Aim low and avoid disappointment."

Zack Martin: Aim low and avoid disappointment.

It was then when a woman and two children arrived and approached the base of one of the trees to look inside. Now people don't just take a walk in the park with their kids and all of a sudden decide to start examining a tree where a geocache was known to be hidden. I knew what was happening here. I don't like to reveal myself to be a geocacher to other cachers immediately, but given the circumstances I considered identifying myself and asking if they thought they could find it. I decided against it and chose to just stick around and see how things played out. I pulled out my phone to tweet about how things were progressing. Here are the tweets:

http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93424279168884736
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93425010185740288
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93426534832013313
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93427471239753728
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93428842470973440
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93430076066115584
http://twitter.com/Ambient_Skater/status/93433271563722752

The woman and her kids came out of the bushes and sat down on a nearby bench, eying me nervously. At first I assumed they had found the cache and were signing the logbook on the bench. Great, they'd replace it once they were done and I could pick it right up and finally close the book on this case. Only they never did replace the cache, and instead walked off towards the playground. I thought they had gone for a walk with the cache while they waited for me to leave. Well I wasn't going anywhere, and when they didn't return, I went looking for them. *play Mission Impossible theme song*

The subjects.

I found them pretty fast and followed them a short distance to the parking lot. What were they doing? You guys still have the cache, you can't just leave. Well maybe they were walking to Chloe's Cache. It made sense to search for both caches on one trip, as I had done last time. But they did not go to Chloe's Cache. They got into their SUV, a tan Jeep Liberty, sat inside for a few minutes, and then drove away. That's when I decided to log a DNF. For a second I wanted to commandeer a car and get in a geo-car chase, or maybe get on my skateboard and grab the SUV and then climb onto the roof, but decided against it.

Later on, I realized that they may not have found the cache. I thought that perhaps they couldn't find it, sat down on the bench to rest and wait for me to leave, then left the park when they realized I wasn't leaving. But the confusion starts here. This log was posted on the cache later that day, claiming a find. The log states that "we even saw a teen walk by watching us so we just sat down on a bench near by the cache but finally they left." They sat down on the bench shortly after I walked by and started watching them, but I'm pretty sure they left before I did. I am now completely confused, and I figure these are all the possible scenarios:

• They got bored waiting for me to leave and left and never found the cache. The smiley they logged is a lie.
• They dropped the cache into its hiding spot really quick when they left (they walked right past the tree they were examining on the way out)
• They returned at some point after they went on their walk and rehid the cache while I was tweeting about the ordeal.

Number two doesn't seem likely since I checked the tree they walked by and found nothing. Number three is impossible because, well, I may miss things sometimes, but there's no way I'm that unobservant. Which leaves number one. I suppose I will have to email this kool11 and conduct a little interrogation. And I'll be sure not to come back to this disaster until I can get one of the Rinos.

UPDATE July 26th: Got one of the Rinos. Will search for the cache tomorrow, then follow up with another post.