Geocaching - It's Not About the Numbers

Saturday was an unusually warm winter day. (It seems that we are in for a real chiller this year.) It's dropped 25 degrees so far today and is supposed to go down another 20 by tonight.

Anyway, we decided to head back to the area that we tried two weeks ago when we got frozen out. Although there was four inches of fresh snow on the ground, some of the caches were labeled as "winter friendly". We figured that we'd get a few.

But we had to pass on the first one. A bunch of kids were sledding way too close by for my comfort. I never want to be the reason that a cache gets muggled.

The next one was somewhere around this old limestone kiln.

But where?

DNF!

So on down the trail we went. In the center of this next photo you can just see the bridge under which the next cache was hidden.

Did I mention that there was fresh snow on the ground?

Did I also mention that it was an unusually warm winter day?

Did I mention that I don't like bridge caches even on a good day?

It was all drippy and slippery under there.

Another DNF!

But we found this gi-normous old cottonwood tree next to the bridge. And it had this huge hole near the bottom. Now most of us have seen holes near the bottom of large trees. Great places to hide geocaches.

But this hole was so big that the cache container could have been a Mini Cooper.

Really!

Here's a shot I took up into the tree. Spooky!

So we did get one find that day. It was camoed as a bat hibernation box. There was a full sized ammo can inside!

Looks real, doesn't it?

We walked 3 1/2 miles (uphill, in the snow) and got one more smiley. But it's not about the numbers. Is it?