At the tail end of a string of caches, I convinced Nostrada to go give the new coordinates a try. "It's only a quarter of a mile" I said because that's how far my GPSr said from where we parked. We took a trail that headed us in the wrong direction so we did some other caches first. Then we tried to make it back to this stage but only found ourselves on ever-narrowing trails that eventually ended in a very dubious cliff.
We went back and tried for another route. This time we stayed on the trail for a while longer. Then we found a point at which it seemed the cache was 500 feet off the very steep side of this trail. I decided to go for it and Nostrada followed. My reception was spotty but something strange started to happen - I began to get farther away. The further down I went, the further away I got. Finally I realized that I had made a terrible error and the cache was not down the cliff but up the cliff on the other side of the trail.
Nostrada didn't want to go back up, so he went parallel to the trail while I scrambled back up. When I reached the trail no one was around, so I wasn't sure what to do. I decided to continue up the trail for a bit to see if they went that way. After a few minutes of hiking, I was convinced they couldn't have gone this far, but then I remembered that when I was in this park before I saw a trail that ran parallel to this one further up. I hussled up the trail and sure enough found the trail. A ways down the trail I found the cache. Hooray! I took a few new instruction sheets and headed back down.
A half hour later I arrived back to where the others were waiting. I thought it might be funny to grimace and pretend to limp a bit as I arrived to see if they were worrying about me. As they approached in concern I broke into a sprint waving the sheets in my hand. They didn't think it was funny.
Posted by jeff at April 4, 2004 01:00 PM