Car Caching Along the Backroads of Lamont County
Car-caching a series of caches along a road is all about surviving monotonous repetition. One comes up near a cache hide, stops the car on the side of the road as safely as possible, and gets out to zero in on a cache that has been hidden somewhere in the trees that line the road.
As you might guess, this repetition can quickly become monotonous. When doing it solo the monotony one feels can be smothered with the idea that many caches are being found. But the silenced part of your reason asks, “What’s the point of finding these things just for the sake of a higher cache find count - the ’numbers’ as it’s referred to in the caching community?” In other words, what’s the point of more numbers when the experience itself is monotonous?
All this is to introduce an afternoon car-caching outing with my caching buddy Hugh today. After attending a “Cache In, Trash Out” (CITO) event in Fort Saskatchewan this morning where we and a few others did a pretty admirable job of gathering a bunch of bags of garbage from a small park, we had some lunch at a Subway and then travelled a good hour north of Fort Sask to a series of cache hides along a country road.
The cache-finding mojo pendulum swung around during the outing today: at first, we made quick finds, some more quickly than others, but then we got spotty results and didn’t find a few either. It’s sobering when you are the first ever to log “Did Not Finds” on caches, but that’s exactly what we were doing.
We were getting more and more tired as the trip went on, no question and sometimes that can affect the amount of patience one can exercise when not finding a geocache. But we attempted each find until we both were satisfied there was no sense continuing.
One factor that tired us out more quickly than usual was the amount of deadfall in the ditches: mostly poplar trees that we had to navigate around while looking for the caches. I wouldn’t say these barriers weren’t a factor at the majority of the caches but they were enough of a factor to be increasingly annoying the more tired we got.
We ended up flipping the “off switch”, as I call it, without attempting the last ten hides in the series. We were done and decided to return home.
It was fun rambling down roads we’d not been along before though. There’s joy in exploring places you’ve never been to before, even when it’s about 161 meters at a time (the mandatory spacing between geocache hides) and especially when done with friends.
The Route Today#
Gallery#
