04/03/2012 By Kabutroid
This cache ended up being significantly more of an adventure than was needed. But hey, adventures are fun, so can't go too wrong with that. Except of course for the snow that found its way into my shoes (god knows how there wasn't more). But let's got get ahead of ourselves here.
So I was visiting my mom and sister's family in Carman, and brought along my GPS in case there was a new cache or so kicking around that we hadn't found yet. Last time I was out my nieces (going under geocaching name Blagden) wanted to do some caching, but I didn't have my kit on me, so I made sure to rectify that this time around. So needless to say, not long after I arrived we were heading out the door to tackle the two new caches kicking around. Our first stop was to go after this one, since the second one was down the River Walk trail, which we weren't sure if we'd go after yet. The previous cache log indicated the contents were frozen, but I figured I'd give it a shot at seeing if I could clean it up maybe, and otherwise had some waterproof paper I planned to sign and drop into the container if need be.
Into the car! The two Blagden nieces and myself headed down the almost completely silent road towards the coordinates, and quickly found ourselves nearing ground zero. I pulled the car off the road, and we all hopped out. Giving the GPS to one of the Blagden duo, I let her lead and follow the arrow to the coordinates. It soon became apparent however that I didn't take into account the GPS kinda 'reading ahead' the distance to ground zero when I slowed down though, and we found that crossing the diverson. No worries about getting wet in there though, since it was dry, and would otherwise be frozen. However, the fact that I didn't have the foresight to bring winter boots made things interesting for me. Thus, letting the others lead meant I could just step in their footsteps (they were wearing boots), and limit the snow getting into my shoes... which was only marginally successful 
. After a bit of curving around here and there, we meandered our trail over to where it became apparent the cache would approximately be. We also became aware that had we parked ever so slightly differently, we could have saved a lot of effort and had our feet stay a lot warmer .
But finding ourselves now at ground zero, we began a quick hunt around for the cache. I believe I spotted it first, and we soon had it in hand. However, upon opening it we discovered that the previous 'needs maintenance' log was indeed accurate. And this wasn't just a situation of 'brush the ice off of the contents and it should be relatively fine'. I can't even slightly fathom how this much water got into a lock-and-lock container of all things, but the contents of the container was literally a giant ice cube containing everything inside of it. There was barely any room on top to one side where it must have sat crooked... it's almost as though it was deliberately filled up and then closed 
.
I pried the ice cube out of the cache container, but could barely pull even a single piece of swag off of the bottom of the cube. Due to highly limited spacing inside, I ended up replacing it exactly where it came from so that I could fit it all back into the container. I tossed one of my signature micromail balls in (I was out of regular size at the moment, but that wouldn't have even remotely fit anyway. Taking a small sheet of my waterproof paper (cut to notepad size), I signed it for both myself and team Blagden, and dropped it on top of the ice cube, now replaced inside the cache.
I really wish I could have done more, but without several of those insta-heating packs and like... 45 minutes, all I would have succeeded in doing is destroying everything.
Thanks for the cache though, albeit frozen solid. At least there's a sheet of paper there for people to sign for now.
Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and micromail ball
No More Floods
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