The Staff Station

10/03/2012 By Kabutroid
Aw man... there was apparently not one, but TWO trackable items inside this cache container somewhere? Well shoot... if I hadn’t been so tired, and a bit worried since this was a bit down the ‘employees only’ road (the fact that it’s been approved by the park didn’t actually cross my mind until now when I’m logging it), I might have looked around in the container more and moved them along. Although, given the trackables haven’t been logged since September and October of last year, I get the feeling that they both may be missing.

But I get ahead of myself. Today was as a whole a beautiful day out, and just about the most ideal March day one could geocache on. It was however significantly less ideal for snowshoeing, what with the hot sun, almost entire lack of breeze, and sticky wet snow... all of the above being what tired me out before heading for this cache. However, since I was parked on the North Drive, I really didn’t want to continue for another half-kilometer to the cache and back again with snowshoes, and instead opted to just drive the car as close as possible and look for closer parking. Well, that ended up not working quite as well as anticipated, since the closest parking was a lot for what I think was the main park office, still several hundred meters away (I didn’t want to park on the edge of the road, since there were pretty large snow banks stopping me from pulling over too far, and the occasional car was still going down the roads. I avoided walking through the park office area in general though, and backtracked down the road to the cache on foot.

Once I neared the coordinates, I was a little bit perplexed as to where the cache could be hidden since my GPS kept trying to put me in the middle of the road. Trying on one side, I came up empty very quickly, since there was very few places a cache could possibly hide around there. I mean, it’s a ‘regular’ size cache... it’s not like something of that size can hide in the crook of a tree branch or something. Hopping over to side two, I almost immediately spotted the cache container. The previous finder says in his log that he saw it from the road, and I’m honestly not too surprised. The only reason I didn’t was the aforementioned large snow drifts plowed up onto the edge of the road (which in actuality probably melted within the next two days after finding this). Getting over the snow drift was a bit interesting, and almost ended up with a boot full of snow, but once over that obstacle, the cache was quickly grabbed and opened. As I said above, I didn’t spend as much time with the cache than I normally would have, so I quickly dropped in a micromail ball (I was temporarily out of my regular size ones... a problem since corrected) and signed the logbook. I was rather amused by the cache container, in that the lid can very easily be removed. Normally with this type of container, the lid is permanently attached to the base. Really nice actually... I kinda wish any of this type of container that I have kicking around at home were of this style. Oh well... one takes what one gets.

But with the logbook signed, I attempted to come up with a way of hiding the container a little bit better, since given what was in the immediate vicinity of the cache, it looks like it was once at least partially hidden with a natural camouflage of sorts. However, the fairly deep snow at the time and my lack of snowshoes on me hindered my moving about to try to improve upon the camo, so I attempted to make due with what was immediately at hand. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that much, and the cache is still quite visible, despite my best efforts. Hopefully with the snow gone by the time the next finder gets here, they might be able to do a bit better of a job.

That said and done however, I headed back to the car, tired and happy. Thanks for the cache!

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and micromail ball