Warning!!!
This post contains descriptions and photographs of specific geocaches that may be considered spoilers. If you geocache in the Eagan/Apple Valley/Rosemount area, you are hereby warned: do not read this post until you have completed the Halloween 2008 series by bflentje.
Being surprised on your own is just too sweet!
Now, on with the post. (Scroll down.)
The disclaimer is for the creator of those caches - cause I'm a nice guy.
We celebrated Thanksgiving by doing some geocaching. We wanted to finish up the Halloween series located just south of The Cities.
Here's another scary cache container found inside a hollow log.
Make sure you read this post for photos of our first hunt.
Well, we didn't get them cleaned up - still two to go - because today, one of them took a full hour to find. The name of the cache was Polycephaly - meaning, more than one head.
To get to GZ, we hiked the trail as close as it would take us, then bushwhacked to the edge of a steep hill. Luckily we chose to hunt this one in the winter when all the foliage was down. It would have required a machete otherwise.
We had pretty good GPS coverage from the top of the hill. The arrow on our device pointed directly at a giant, broken oak tree. Great place to hide a geocache. But as we went down the hill, the needle went crazy. First it pointed north, then east, then back up the hill.
Begin drunken bee dance.
Enough of this silliness. It has to be the big tree. So we went back to it.
It was obvious that previous searchers had torn through every log and branch within 20 feet of the oak.
So we looked.
We found nothing.
Wayfarer checked the post notes on her Blackberry. Polycephaly was found just yesterday. It has to be here.
We looked again.
We found nothing.
We went over that tree with a fine toothed comb. It must be nearby.
More drunken bee dance.
No, it had to be at the tree. The on-line logs claimed that this was the creepiest cache of the series - almost disturbing. It had to be here.
So I sat down and looked at the tree. Something had to be out of place. There must be a clue to the hiding spot. The tree was huge - probably 10 feet around at the base. It split into two main trunks some 4 to 5 feet off the ground, and both sections were broken off 12 to 15 feet up.
My eyes scanned from the base up to the top. Part way up through a split in the wood, I spotted something that looked . . . the wrong color.
Something was up in that broken trunk!
I climbed up as far as I could, and at the very limit of my reach, I put my hand into the tree trunk and grasped the cache container.
Polycephaly
