Sunday, June 14, 2009

Geocaching Fun (photos)

What a weekend we had! Friday night the Penguins won the Stanley Cup. Saturday we got most of the garden work done and Sunday afternoon we went geocaching and fishing in Oil Creek State Park.

When we got near Titusville, I pulled out my GPSr and followed the route outside of Titusville to an old cemetery. The headstones dated back to at least 1845. We followed the arrow on my GPS until we were back in the woods. We looked and looked. I was just about ready to give up because there was so much growth that you couldn't see anything. I looked at a log. I wondered.

I took my walking stick and gave it a little push.


I was pretty proud of myself finding this one.




I logged in on the logbook and hid it back the way it was for the next geocacher. Then we headed to the next geocache and it, too, happened to be a cemetery one. These old cemeteries are way out in the woods. This next one had weird GPS readings. The arrow kept changing one way or another. The geocacher that hid the cache warned about this problem in that particular location. We were so fascinated with the fence and cemetery flowers and headstones that it wouldn't have mattered if we found it or not.



The gate was so pretty



The caches are usually hidden outside the cemeteries not right in them. After we came out of the cemetery we did a once around one more time where the GPSr was pointing and it gave me 0 feet left. I knew it had to be there. And it was!



This one happened to be in an ammo box. I like those caches the best. They are easier to find than the micro caches. Inside are lots of little trinkets. Families that geocache love these because the kids get to pick something to take out of the box.



If you take something, you are suppose to add something of equal or greater value. We haven't taken anything yet in our geocaching. We need to go buy a few little things so we can add to the boxes.

The next geocache was at a spring along the side of the road and hidden somewhere nearby was the cache. We couldn't find it. We found the spring, though and it was pretty neat but I wasn't going to go hiking up a slippery cliff looking for it with traffic whizzing by at 55 mph so we went to the next one.

Another cemetery. I didn't realize I was going to be going to 3 cemeteries today. We just were taking them in order of "the nearest to our present position." The next one was a lost cemetery in the state park. The trail was just about non-existent and we literally had to bushwack through the underbrush and growth, much which was thorny berry bushes to get to it. My husband had shorts on. :-o



We were suppose to use a certain headstone as a clue to replace a letter in the coordinates to the actual cache. Well, that didn't go too well because the coordinates were in a different format than what I had on my GPSr and I didn't know how to change it. We scouted around a bit to see if we could spot the actual cache but there was so much brush it was impossible. We came across this nearby.



When I saw the yellow pipe I knew what it meant. I had just read last week that Oil Creek State Park people were going to comb the park in grids looking for old gas and oil wells and dangerous holes from such and mark them with the yellow pipes. This old oil well (or gas) had what looked like a deep hole all around it. Without the right coordinates, we didn't know how far the cache could be from the headstone or in which direction. We left without finding the cache. It was too dangerous to just scout outside the trails until the park marks all the hazards.

It was time anyway to get decked-out in our waders and hit the creek flyfishing for trout and small-mouth bass. The weather and temperature were perfect. The hatch was good. My husband caught lots of fish. I caught 2 bass. The flute of the wood thrush was sounding for quite some time at dusk, it was beautiful. A raccoon appear near us and was hunting crayfish and two Great Blue Herons were down stream in silhouette. Several ducks flew overhead in the failing light. It was totally dark with fireflies blinking away and a light chill in the air when we slowly made our way out of the creek. It was all so much fun!

2 comments:

Mary C said...

Sounds like a very full and fulfilling weekend. I sure hope this weekend is just as fulfilling for you.

Cali-Burgher said...

Looks like fun!