Ok, it's the 25th of February.  I've found 4 of the Hides of Horror, all very cool containers, all in out of the way places right under your nose that you might never have wandered across without a purpose to go there.  Ah, that's on of the things that's made this such an obsession for me.  The logs are out there for you to read, but I also keep a journal for caching.  I don't write every cache adventure in the journal, but this ones in there.  The cache; The Mummy -- Hides of Horror, GC1GK8H.  The time, lunchtime.  I start the journal entry:

"This was to be a quick, lunch time find.  A 3-part multi-cache in a park.  Find the first part, take those co-ordinates to go to the second part, then the last co-ordinates to the final cache.  The find logs all talked about tough terrain, but I wasn't too worried.

I should have been.  The first find didn't take too long, but the second took me to a place where I had to climb down a very steep hill.  The second part of the hide was more difficult to find.  It took nearly my whole lunch hour to find the first two and in the process, I fell and got my pants and shoes muddy.

No more multi's at lunch, or else I just have to do them one part at a time."--end of journal entry.

Actually, part two would not have needed to take me down such a steep hill, had I approached from the right direction (heh heh, I think I'll leave that pretty detail out).  But I made the note and went back to work with muddy pants.  My co-workers got a chuckle out of that.

The next day was not conducive to searching(very muddy), so I had to wait until the 27th to go after the final.  By now the ground was quite frozen and much less slippery. I had this one in the bag.  Stop laughing, Bosac.  I found parking near where I could go into the woods and get the quick find, and started off into the park.  Wow.  There are some steep drops in there!  I circumnavigated around the park for some time, choosing not to try to make a bee-line to the final location.  It actually was a good decision, although my initial start was all wrong.  I felt like a billy goat back there.  I found the cache after quite the walk.  The container was another one that had taken a little effort and imagination, and I just had to take some photos of the thing.  I got a couple of the container out of it's hiding place, one remote picture of me with the cache, and then I put the cache back into its cover and grabbed my camera to take one last picture of the hide.  Now, I'm somewhat of an amateur photographer, so I was framing the shot just the way I wanted it.  Moved around a little to the right, a step back to get the whole thing in...

Honest, there was a path there just a moment ago.  When I stepped back, my foot found only open air.  I threw my camera and tried to get my balance forward, but I was already gone, over the edge, and down the hill.  When I finally settled at the bottom, I looked up and said, aloud, to nobody, "that could have been much worse," and got up and climbed back up to pick up my camera and my other stuff.  Then it was back to work.  I did get that picture, but I'm not sharing it here.  I don't intentionally spoil hides.  The trek back to the Jeep was much easier, now that I knew where the steep stuff was.  On the way, I spotted a group of deer, something I did not expect to see in this area, but they were too quick for me to get a good picture of.  Oh well.

By JETSchmidt

A native Nebraskan (grew up in Elkhorn), I live in Bellevue with my
Lovely Wife and Son.  I've been a pilot and flight instructor
since 1988, but work in Information Systems to pay the bills.
I became obsessed with Geocaching in January of 2009, although I had
heard of the sport way back when I bought my first handheld
GPSr, a Garmin ETrex, when they first were introduced.
My favorite caches are the ones that take you somewhere off the beaten
track.  The one's out in the woods, or in hidden parks,
and the one's that someone took a lot of thought into creating.

--
---The sky is not a limit,
It is home.
-Terry Schmidt