Milk & Cookies Geocache

For local readers that hunt geocaches in the Twin Cities West Metro, this post contains spoilers. So if you don't want to know the truth . . .

We placed another geocache on the Luce Line this afternoon - Milk and Cookies. It's not published yet. We are going to wait a day or two so some of the snow can melt. Following our tracks right to the cache is way too easy.

That's not a cookie on the right - that's the cache container! (Click on any photo to enlarge.) Found that baby at the Dollar Store. So I went to my trusty Google Earth file showing all the geocaches on the Luce, zoomed in, and found the perfect place in the aerial photo.

When we got to the trail, it was a sloppy mess. Snowmobilers that weren't quite ready to surrender the trail to the melting snow, have churned up parts of it into gooey mud.

Anyway, when we found the perfect hiding spot and set up the trusty Garmin GPS unit, the actual coordinates were .002 N, and .001 W degrees off my Google Earth estimate. Who needs a GPSr for this stuff? Just look at that tree. Does it not cry out, "Hey there's a geocache hidden here!" When I first saw it, the thing brought tears to my eyes.

Well, that right-hand limb, the one split wide open, has the perfect hidey-hole on the back side.
There's plenty of wild rose bush to make getting to it just a bit of a challenge. Keeps the muggles from wandering off the trail too. If you enlarge the photo on the left, you will see the Oreo Cookie hidden way back in there. A small piece of bark covering it makes the whole thing complete. No one could accidentally find this one.

Just for scale.

Another Geocaching FTF

I had to make a business trip up to Fargo, ND this week, and it looks like someone's been posting on my blog while I was gone! Hmmm. Wonder what that's all about???? Note to self... turn on password protection.

This is how the Fargo trip went.

Anyway, enough of that.

I woke up this morning to the fun message in my email. Ponder$DOG placed Trolls on the Luce out on the Luce Line Trail. Ponder$DOG just found our Luce Line caches five days ago. That must have inspired him, because this is his first hide. It fits right in with my master plan to California-ize geocaching on the Luce Line.

It was a good hide, but it included a bridge. (Trolls? Bridge? Get it?) I generally don't like bridge caches because they are hard, and I'm a wimp. I like geocaches that are the size of a VW Beetle (the old ones) sitting on the 50-yard line in the Metrodome, with orange ribbons streaming from it. That's the kind of geocaches I like.

Trolls on the Luce was a small Lock & Lock, was well hidden, and took us a while to find the thing. But it felt great to get our 5th FTF. The photo is the Luce Line as it appeared this morning in 25 degree temps. Still cold and icy. Come on spring!

FTF on Sugar and Spice

Speedysk1, who got the FTF at Sugar and Spice, was kind enough to post the pictures on his Flikr account. (Click on the photo to view the series.)

I think he caught the red eyes perfectly!

(For the readers in Southern California and Arizona, the white stuff in the photo is snow.)

Just thought I'd share.

Geocaching on the Luce Line

We placed two new geocaches on the Luce Line Trail today. One is named, A Good Time on the Luce Line. And the other is Sugar & Spice. A Good time on the Luce Line is a plastic coffee can, filled with decent swag; a mini flashlight, a tape measure-key chain, scary teeth with fake blood, and other cool stuff. There's plenty of room for trade items and trackables. On the left of the photo, you can see the remnants of the tree in which we placed the cache. (Click any photo to enlarge) We'll probably have to go back out in a few weeks to adjust the cache because the middle of the stump was filled with two feet of snow. Although it's only 30 feet or so off the trail, it might get a little nasty in the summer. I ran into quite a bit of wild rose on my way in there. Lots of thorns.

Sugar & Spice was also placed in a downed tree stump. Except Sugar & Spice is not as sweet as one would expect. You may remember reading my previous post about the micro in the rubber spider? Well my friends, that is Sugar & Spice.
I had to do a little work on it to get the cache container to stay put, but plastic epoxy seems to work wonders. To the left, you can see the Luce Line in snow. This is actually the horse path that parallels the bike path and hiking trail, up and to the left. This time of year they are both used primarily for snowmobiles. The broken stump right next to the trail is where Sugar & Spice is waiting for some hapless geocachers to come looking.

On the right here, is a close up of the cache container at Sugar & Spice. Although the photo doesn't show it, the spider is down in a recessed hole in the stump. We covered it with a flat piece of bark. Imagine when somebody lifts that bark and sees this!

It will take a couple of days for me to get the page on geocaching.com completed, and get it published.

Spiders Geocaching?

Here's an idea for geocaching. This specimen is to be placed along the Luce Line Trail, and would be named, Sugar & Spice.

To the right you see a common, rubber spider that might be found along any geocaching trail in the contiguous United States; no different than any other Dollar Store, rubber spider. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

All spiders except those in the families Uloboridae and Holarchaeidae, and in the suborder Mesothelae (together about 350 species) can inject venom to protect themselves or to kill and liquefy prey. Only about 200 species, however, have bites that can pose health problems to humans. Many larger species' bites may be quite painful, but will not produce lasting health concerns.

Spiders are found all over the world, from the tropics to the Arctic, living underwater in silken domes they supply with air, and on the tops of mountains. In 1973 Skylab 3 took two spiders into space to test their web-spinning capability in free-fall.

OK. OK, we get it. Spiders...

Alright.

But this rubber spider is a little different than most others. Turn it over and you will find a geocache hidden inside - complete with micro log. Pretty clever, wouldn't you say, loved ones? A perfect addition to our growing collection of geocaches along the Luce Line.

More Caches on the Luce Line?

For the current Minnesota Ice Age, we have a PQ of caches that have the winter accessible attribute - which really cuts into the caches available. Yesterday we went out in search of some small towns, with neighborhood parks, that contained caches. Only to find that small towns don't bother to plow the parking lots of neighborhood parks. We went by three of them that had no on-street parking, and two-foot snow drifts in the parking lots. No joy today, so we walked the Luce Line to look for hide opportunities.

I once thought that there were SO MANY geocaches around here that there was hardly room for more. As you know, we placed The Luce Line Crossing last week. You can see it on the map in the upper right-hand corner. (Click to make map larger.) The trail is visible as a dark, thin line near the top. Along with our cache, you can see three others along the 3.5-mile stretch of trail. The next geocache to the west (off picture) is a mile further down the trail.

Over the past eight months, we've scored quite a few geocaches along the Luce Line - probably over a dozen. But as you can see, some of those geocaches are more than a mile apart. To get six in a day requires getting in and out of the car, or a 12-mile hike, round trip. Nothing like they have out in Disneyland. So I'm going to start thinking like a California geocacher. Shouldn't there be more caches on the Luce Line?

Here's a photo of my proposal. While out yesterday, we found decent hiding spots at each pin location. In the same space that once held four caches, now would have 10. There's still some 1800 feet, on average, between caches. Or should we take out three, space them out a bit, and make seven where there was once four?

It's not like we are over-crowding. The Luce Line is a 63-mile trail, and we are talking about three miles of trail here. Below is a series of geocaches named bikeathon along a regional trail in the near, West Metro area. As you can see, some of the caches are placed even closer than the ones I proposed. And people rave about doing the series.

So I leave it up to my readers - how many more geocaches should we place on the Luce Line?

Luce Line Crossing Geocache

After our disappointing DNH of Saturday, we braved the balmy 32 degree weather to place the Luce Line Crossing Geocache. It's on the nearby Luce Line, a Rails-to-Trails type of trail.

Here's a shot of the Luce Line in its day

Here's the Luce Line Today (Actually, there's a lot of snow on it today)

It's a small cache, not too far from the parking area, so it will be great for families with small kids. We use the Luce Line a lot. For hiking, biking and geocaching. (There's room for a few more out there.) The far west end was were we had that very disappointing DNF at the Trestle Collapses, but we've also found a lot of very cool caches along the Line. I hope the Luce Line Crossing lives up to the expectations of its siblings.

Update: I got the email that our cache was published at 6:38 pm. At 7:19 pm, I received another email informing me that jrest had claimed the FTF - less than an hour from published cache to FTF. Now that's some geocaching!