Sunday, September 02, 2007

The Blair Witch and Geocaching

Have you ever seen the Blair Witch project? Well, Mr. Chucklehead hadn't so we watched it the other night...a little suspense...not really scary, but gets you thinking about the woods and the dark and the things that go bump...

Now that Mr. Chucklehead's toes are healing nicely we decided to go for a little geocaching to get in our exercise for yesterday. We decided this a little later in the day...it is a holiday weekend and all so we took our time doing ANYTHING yesterday. I left it to him to find a couple of good caches that would have us walking around a couple of hours and he did me proud.

The first one, called the end of the sidewalk was not really at the end...it was a good 20 minute hike up the side of a Portland west hills "mountain." We had a great time...eventually found it and logged our finds.

The second one was two part. We had to find the first coordinates to be able to move on to the second. Well, by the time we had found the second coordinates it was already getting later in the day...we found two access points to the cache...one was clearly marked NO TRESPASSING and had hazardous chemical signs posted...uhm...yeah...not going that way. The other was about 3/10 or a mile across what looked like a large field.

The sun was starting down and although there was plenty of light we figured a quick little walk wouldn't hurt and we'd get back in no time at all.

We started off across the field and quickly realized this would be a little different than we thought. Bushwacking started immediately...we found poison oak :( and eventually stumbled onto a "logging road" which was actually just tracks made my a CAT. Followed those for awhile and well, to make a long story short...found the cache just as it got dusky dark. The kind of dark where you can make out whats 5 feet in front of you, but further than that its quite ominously well...to be frank...Blair Witch woodsy dark.

I freaked myself out...but in my defense the spiderwebs were out to get me. We had to bushwack it back out...found what we thought was the field, but wasn't...continued to bushwack and made it back to the car after spotting an owl, deer, skunk and a few bats...

Luckily there were no stone piles or weird hanging stickmen anywhere near it.

So...moral of the story is don't watch the Blair Witch Project if you plan on bushwacking through the forest at near dark. I know most of you don't have to be told that, but for the select few who think like Mr. Chucklehead and I...just a little word of caution. :)