There's something distinctly odd about the sensation of dress pants brushing against small wounds or bee stings as you type and mouse on your workstation, like you're leading some kind of double life.\n\n<<back>>
We tried using my GPS's street navigation system to get here, and it didn't really work. Though I only had topographical maps loaded on the GPS, it still had a decent amount of detail when it came to roads as well. The trick was that it couldn't look up an address for you, but it would.\n\nWe punched in the geocache and had it calculate a route, but the route was completely wrong. We kept it on on the theory that it would recalculate a saner route once we were halfway there, but instead it just kept beeping at us as it continually tried to recalculate. Evidently it couldn't get a handle on things -- at 55 mph, I was driving too fast for its brain to work.\n\nAnyway, I got there by driving the way I had charted out on Google Maps, though we overshot the suggested starting point by a little. The trail was a [[fire road]] that led downhill, to a small stream crossing right beside the reservoir. The reservoir's level was very high, and the surface of the water was almost perfectly still. It was pretty \n\nUsually trails that lead to the reservoir are bad news; there are lots of them for use by fishermen, but they're almost always short cul-de-sacs, not part of a larger trail. The GPS said that the geocache was up on the ridge we were walking below, and it looked as though we were about to start heading away from it. I wondered if were supposed to climb the ridge, or maybe retrace our steps. There were two gates at the trailhead, and we chose what we thought was the one indicated in the directions, but who can say for sure?\n\nIt was a basic orienteering sort of dilemma, but I don't know a thing about orienteering.\n\n[>img[liberty1log.jpeg]]My dad was reluctant to go all the way back, so we kept going, and we discovered that the trail looped back on itself and climbed uphill. The hill was steep but climbable -- it made me think of [[the waterfall]] in Milford -- and the cache was nearby. It only took a minute to find; it was a white Tupperware container hidden beneath a log, which stuck out amid the mostly brown ground.\n\nThe edge of the ridge cut down on the possible places it could be, and I had started to develop a way to search for things once we were inside the GPS's error range. What I would do was back away from the exact location and point myself towards it, then look up from the GPS and tell myself, "I am looking exactly at it right now." After doing that a few times from different locations, I could do sort of a primitive kind of triangulation in my head.\n\nThere were fewer things in the box, and only one log book. Leafing through the log book was still fascinating, though, and I felt proud I was able to find it so quickly.\n\nI took a plastic figure of a chicken with half its egg still on its head -- maybe a character from //Chicken Little//? -- and left behind a bag of marbles.\n\nWe returned along the trail, and I took some pride in taking the lead up the hill to where we had parked. Usually my dad smokes me on the way back from a walk. I guess he's got more endurance than me. But this time I was still in [[mountain goat mode]] from the steep uphill climb onto the ridge, and made it back without breaking a sweat.\n\n[[See it on geocaching.com|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=ec9f3a63-c218-4600-935c-561f0a7729cb]]\n\n<<back>>
.content ul\n{\n padding-top: 0px;\n text-align: left;\n padding-left: 0.5em;\n list-style-type: disc;\n}\n\n.content ul li\n{\n display: list-item;\n}
The football team stolen from the city of Baltimore. I wasn't old enough to be paying attention to it, but watching the Ravens lose to them 15-6 in the playoff game two days before was heartbreaking.\n\n<<back>>
The worst was the day I set out on my own last fall, at [[Soldier's Delight|http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/central/soldiers.html]]. I'd been there before but I had never walked the longest trail there, and I resolved to do it. Soldier's Delight is an interesting place -- it's got a midwest feel to it, with stretches of rocky plain. A sign at the overlook says that it was the largest producer of chrome in the world at one point.\n\nThe long path took me into more traditionally wooded areas, right along the edge of one of the new housing developments that are sprouting up all over here. It was a nice, quiet walk nonetheless, and I ran into a young Russian couple walking a dog. The woman asked me for directions. I told them to walk back the way I came, where they'd run into the orange trail. Turning right there should lead them back to the parking lot. I didn't have my map with me, but I remembered it well enough -- I knew I didn't want to take the turn myself. They thanked me and as I continued on, I marvelled silently that I knew enough to answer their question. I'm usually bad at these kinds of things.\n\nTwenty minutes I was in front of a landmark I had passed before: a tiny access road with a wooden sign pointing past a house whose purpose I couldn't figure out. This was bad. Not only was I going in circles, but I wasn't sure exactly how long I had been doing it -- so I wasn't sure what direction I should go. I decided to turn back, because I could hear cars passing by that direction. I figured I could cut through the underbrush to the road and hike back to the parking lot that way. I at least had a general idea of which direction the parking lot was in.\n\nThe road had no shoulder but there were few cars out there anyway. I walked along it for fifteen minutes but nothing looked familiar; this was not the way I drove in, which meant that I wasn't on the right road. What was worse was I could no longer locate the trail I had been on.\n\nI tried to flag down a passing car but they just drove past me. I wonder if I looked dangerous, then. It was getting near 4:30 pm, according to my cell phone, and the sun would set in maybe an hour or two, and the reality was I didn't know where I was, and I didn't know.\n\nI called my parents.\n\nThere was a definite element of defeat in it, but I told myself: //either you can get picked up in fifteen minutes, or you can keep wandering around for who-knows-how-long, maybe in the wrong direction from your car.// Of course it wasn't fifteen minutes, because I was on an entirely different road than I thought, which made the search process even more complicated, but my mom did find me, for which I am still grateful.\n\nThe lesson to learn: never leave the trail.\n\n<<back>>
There's a park near where a friend's family has a house where there are a beautiful series of ponds linked by waterfalls you can go swimming in. The trick, though, is that to get to it you have to go down a steep steep hill. The bottom is entirely rocky, so you can't help but think about grisly head injury as you try your best to keep your balance. I'm a chump and love my precious fragile skull, so I usually crabwalk my way down.\n\n<<back>>
My car has a temperature sensor for reasons I don't understand, exactly. It's really only useful for knowing if it's close to freezing out, that I should be careful of ice. Beyond that the numbers are meaningless, and I've always wanted to learn the Celsius system -- I mean understand intuitively what 15 degress Celsius feels like -- so I leave it set on that.\n\nThe mechanics returned my car with the temperature reset to Fahrenheit. I wonder if they think I didn't know what the button was supposed to do. (It's labeled ''E/M'' -- M's obviously metric, but E? Maybe a bastardization of imperial.) \n\n<<back>>
[<img[fishergazebo.jpeg]]This was in a newly-constructed park. It had been in the process of construction for a long time, but this was the first time I'd ever set foot in it.\n\nWe parked as centrally as I thought we could imagine, and though I got my GPS to show the path to the cache, I couldn't get the arrow indicating orientation to move reliably. So while I re-calibrated the compass -- it asks you to turn in place slowly twice, as if you're casting a spell -- my father made small talk with another dad, this one coaching his little son on how to drive his mini-Hummer in the parking lot.\n\nFinally we got a good bearing. The path indicated by the GPS led exactly along a long paved walkway from the parking lot to a large gazebo that seemed to serve as the center of the park.\n\nIt seemed almost too easy as we walked down the path. There weren't many people out, even in the warm weather -- mostly people out walking dogs.\n\nThen we noticed that the path led to a twenty-foot-tall chain link fence, and that there was no easy way around it. Hmm. We cut into an adjacent baseball field but the way here was blocked off too. The fences were everywhere into odd little cells. The ground was soaking wet from rains the night before, and I began to feel that perhaps the [[Tevas]] were a bad choice.\n\nEventually we came back to the parking lot and chose a less obvious path that led to a paved walking trail with painted mile markers. The trail was more or less straight, and it was clear we were going in the right direction. Eventually we got to the point where we were within the GPS's margin of error.\n\nWe split up and started searching the ground. It was tough, searching -- I knew it was supposed to be an ammo box, but I wasn't sure how big it would be, and there were fallen leaves everywhere. It seemed possible that the cache would be covered entirely by leaves, which would be impossible to find.\n\nI found two empty liquor bottles, but nothing else. We moved in circles, looking around fallen tree trunks. It was nasty work, searching the vicinity. There were brambles all over and I was wearing shorts. (Also a bad choice.) My father said that it might be a little further down the trail --\n\n"No," I said. "It's right here."\n\n[>img[fisherlotsofstuff.jpeg]]It was hidden where two fallen trees met. The box was painted flat green with yellow letters on it, and it was maybe the size of a first-aid kit. I kneeled down and opened the box slowly; I wasn't exactly sure how the latch was supposed to work. It was nearly bursting with things.\n\nThere were plastic toys, two tiny books (//The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes// in easy English, something related to //The Passion of the Christ// that I didn't look at closely), even Pez. There were two log books sealed in a Zip-loc bag that I leafed through. It was a rush, finding it. There is no way other to describe it -- how strange that this actually worked. Not only that we found it, but that people actually do hide these things.\n\n"We are being observed," my father said.\n\n"By [[the police]]?" I asked.\n\n"No," he said. "Some dogwalkers."\n\nI carefully packed the box back up; it was almost completely full. I took a plastic bear that for some reason caught my eye. It was dirty but after rinsing it off in my sink, it looks nice. In its place I left a tiny stuffed football.\n\nWe walked back to the car along the trail, and as I passed little groups of families and folks out walking dogs, I still felt the rush. I was a participant in a secret: one open to anyone who cared to ask or do a little research. But it was a secret nontheless.\n\nOnce back in the car, I noticed I had [[several scratches on my legs]] from the brambles, including one that had left a long blood-red line across my knee. I had to look down to notice it; I hadn't felt it at all.\n\n[[See it on geocaching.com|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=09f605cc-f399-4a13-9b3f-fdb4a33a2ba3]]\n\n<<back>>
For some reason, the word rankles me. Maybe it's that I'm not so high on Harry Potter these days, but it also implies a certain dorky arrogance, the same way [[LARPers|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game]] use the word //mundanes// to describe people who aren't in on the game.\n\n<<back>>
Going to Ground
I found [[an interesting thread|http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=147205]] about 5/5 caches on the Geocaching forums -- each cache has two difficulty ratings: one describes how hard it is to reach the cache itself, and the other is how clever you have to be to find it once you're there. [[This one|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=d01954ac-b581-4c97-a45f-ec3f074a230e&log=y&decrypt=]] in particular looked epic... and, well, if you're ever in Ethiopia, there's [[a cache|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=1dbe8a3d-1d7f-4d05-93cb-23421a06bcaa]] nestled somewhere near a volcano. \n\n<<back>>
My father and I set out together on an abnormally warm day -- seventy-some degrees only a short while after the new year. I had just seen reports the night before of another massive snowstorm socking Denver in, and [["Sleeping In"]] was stuck in my head.\n\nWe found two caches:\n* [[Fisher's Northwest]]\n* [[Liberty Reservoir #1]]
My paranoia surfaces in odd places, I know, but geocaching looks like a weird activity from an outsider's perspective, and I am always self-conscious about looking weird. And there is some precedent here: in my basic research before starting this adventure, I had read that [[a cache was once mistaken for a bomb|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?IID=bf240bf6-829e-43bd-a09e-d53fbe2e4636&LID=4250271]], and Wikipedia vaguely mentioned that police had been called about cachers.\n\n<<back>>
A present from my sister and her fiancé -- they fit snugly and have lots of grippy bits on their undersides. They look like they're meant to be used by someone serious at the outdoors... which I guess I am, now.\n\n<<back>>
[>img[bucketpines.jpeg]]The trail began at a [[fire road]] marked with two poles freshly painted traffic-cone orange; the instructions warned us not to block the entrance if we took the short way. I wasn't sure what the long way would have been... a sign indicating that this was a hunting area gave me pause, but the GPS said it was only 193 feet to the cache, so it didn't seem too dangerous to turn back.\n\nThe fire road turned out to be a narrow, straight path penned in by tall pine trees. The lower branches of the trees seemed to have been trimmed back, or otherwise stunted. I imagined an actual fire, thought I saw burned vegetation, but surely it was just winter. A fire near the reservoir would have made the news.\n\nWe walked down the path until my GPS said we were within 20 feet -- its margin of error -- so I turned to get a bearing on where it was, and left the path. Even after only three caches, you start to develop an instinct for where caches could be hidden. I saw a cluster of fallen trees and found it there -- an actual bucket painted camoflauged.\n\nInside was an astounding collection of stuff, much better than any of the other caches I had found so far. "An easy find for those who like to trade," the cache's description said. No kidding. There was an even a DVD of one of the //Lord of the Rings// movies.\n\nI didn't take it, though. One of the basic rules of geocaching is that you always trade up. That is, you always leave something of equal or better value to what you take. This is one of the reasons for another geocaching rule: don't let [[muggles]] in on the secret. If you don't know the rules of the game, it'd be way too easy to plunder a cache.\n\nI had brought a shimmery plastic snake, which would've been an even trade for whoever it was that decided to leave a dollar bill folded in half -- but instead I went for a toy dinosaur. I signed the log, again couldn't think of anything to say except that we were there.\n\nIt would have been interesting to keep going along the fire road to see where it led, but there were hunters to consider, and the afternoon was nearly over. So the long way remains unknown to us.\n\n[[See it on geocaching.com|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=18b5e6c0-b572-43b7-9fc4-539cf8c5c84c]]\n\n<<back>>
Sure, it sounded a bit beneath us, but it was described as being in a new park right next to [[Tom Mitchell's Golf Gridiron]]. I wanted to see what the park was like, and whether anything had changed at Tom Mitchell's.\n\nThe parking lot had maybe four cars in it; a pair of mothers and a gaggle of kids played on a playground immediately. I wondered nervously if the cache was hidden right next to the playground -- it was labeled for kids, after all -- but the GPS led us away from them, onto a rough meadow encircling a quartet of baseball fields. The grass was dead yellow, but nicely dry. It had rained off and on the past few days, so I was glad to have [[my new hiking boots]].\n\nThe park's layout was nearly identical to the <<mask "Fisher's Northwest" 'Northwest Regional Park'>>, only without a gazebo at the center of the baseball fields. It had the same oversized icons, as it were, for the different kinds of sports fields -- and, well, the same deserted sense to it. Do people really ever play four baseball games at once here? The park is located next to nothing, exactly; it's a turnoff near a highway.\n\nWe passed a field labeled ''No Trespassing'' adjacent to some power lines and came to a lightly wooded area. My father found a rough sort of path and we cut into the woods; mainly our way was blocked by patches of brambles. I had <<mask "Fisher's Northwest" "learned my lesson">> and wore jeans, so it wasn't too hard to traverse, and I homed in quickly on the cache, hidden in a tree stump.\n\n| [img[kidsstump.jpeg]] |\n\nInside were a nice selection of toys... and an odd golden brooch that depicted a pair of cats: one nestled atop a pillar, another looking up at it. It was obviously not real gold, but it was fashioned from metal nonetheless. There were no markings on its back -- no MADE IN CHINA, even, and it seemed vaguely Egyptian to me. In its place I left a yo-yo, one of my favorite toys when I was growing up.\n\nIt was clear that at one point, water had leaked into the container. The log book containing everything until November 2006 had become a sodden mess, and many of the other things in the container were still wet. I signed my name to the new log, though I couldn't think of anything to say, and tried to rearrange the sticks covering the top of the stump so that it looked at least a little natural. I could imagine lots of kids coming back here on a summer day to play around.\n\nWe turned back for the car, passing the empty baseball fields again. It might have been spooky if we came at twilight; instead it was just the tiniest bit lonely. The children were still playing, and I wondered what the mothers made of the two of us.\n\n[[See it on geocaching.com|http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=8a6cf3ad-47c9-49fd-9308-593a42e4903c]]\n\n<<back>>
!!Going to Ground\n!!!by <<pop 'chris' 'Chris Klimas'>>\nI think I have a sense of direction. I really do. But the truth is that [[I get lost a lot]]. So my parents gave me a GPS unit for Christmas this past year. When I turn it on, it tells me where I am on this earth within 25 feet. It also remembers where I've been, so if I get completely confused, I can retrace my steps exactly. So long as I have a fresh pair of double-A batteries, there is no way I can lose myself in the world. A strange thought.\n\nThe actual device is wizbang, with lots of icons and a scrolling map three states wide. But you can't forget that it is an object of utility. GPS started as a way to direct missile strikes precisely and my device is full of functions like Man Overboard (a quick way to mark the spot where sailors fall off the ship, I guess), optimal times to go fishing in a particular area, even skydiving stuff.\n\nI am an essentially impractical person, though. So instead of any of this, I go [[geocaching]] with it, and this is my ongoing journal. It's one thing to know where you are. It's quite another, learning how to find what's hidden.\n* [[6 January 2007]]\n* [[15 January 2007]]
The principle behind geocaching is simple: someone hides a waterproof container somewhere in the great outdoors, and records its latitude and longitude. Then they post the coordinates on the Web and other people go out and find it. In the container is a logbook, which you sign in and write love-letters to the people who hid it, and a collection of... well, gimcracks. Little toys and gewgaws that aren't worth much, so if someone stumbles upon the geocache accidentally, there isn't much incentive to loot it. You get to take one of those things, but you must replace it with something else you brought with you.\n\nThere's something beautifully symmetrical about it. GPS threatens to remove one of the most enduring mysteries of the planet Earth: geography. There are no longer any unknown parts of the map, and you can locate yourself exactly. Geocaching continues the cycle: people embed mystery in what's already known.\n\n<<back>>
I am six feet and six inches tall, which for now is above above-average for height. This means a lot of things, practically speaking. My head is level with most showerheads, and most shoe stores don't sell anything my size. It also means that when I walk with people, I do so at a little slower pace than I normally would. I have to watch them and make sure I don't go too fast or too slow.\n\nSo when I scale hills I can forget what speed I should I be going and just walk, and that's why I love them in their own little way.\n\n<<back>>
I love them for hiking, especially for stream crossings. You can just wade across them without worrying about getting anything permanently dirty.\n\n<<back>>
The weather wasn't quite so warm as it was our first time, but it was still solidly [[in the sixties]] today. The clouds overhead were dense and deep gray, threatening rain at any moment. We left at 3 pm; my car was in the shop getting its 60,000 mile maintenance, so my father drove. I had planned to go geocaching further south but plans fell through, so the two we found were the result of a hasty search:\n* [[Kids Cache]]\n* [[Fun Bucket]]\nWhen we finished, it was clear that we weren't novices anymore. I looked at the clues for these beforehand, but I think we could have found them easily without more specific instructions. It helps, having a reliable GPS -- though we were in fairly thick woods on the [[Fun Bucket]] cache, we never had trouble getting an accurate signal.\n\nTonight I'm planning a more [[serious outing]]. Pondering whether it would be more interesting to do a series of six caches in Oregon Ridge, followed by a cache smack dab in the middle of the newly-renovated Hunt Valley Mall (after dinner, maybe). Or a longer walk through unknown territory to a little finger of land off Liberty Reservoir. It may be a moot point. From what I've read, we will descend back into winter tomorrow, and it may be a good while until it's warm enough for a comfortable walk. I've never liked the blandness of winter -- only the snow.\n\n<<back>>
A fire road is a fairly wide gravel path meant to be used by vehicles if a fire breaks out in a park. I learned this the hard way on a hike earlier this year; the directions in the book I learned about it in were vague as to where you were supposed to start, and there were many openings along the road we were directed to park on. Fire roads are just like art: you'll know it when you see one. If you're not sure, it isn't one.\n\n<<back>>
Again last night I had that strange dream\nWhere everything was exactly how it seemed\nNo concerns about the world getting warmer\nPeople thought that they were just being rewarded\nFor treating others as they'd like to be treated\nFor obeying stop signs and curing diseases\nFor mailing letters with the address of the sender\nNow we can swim any day in November\n\n-- The Postal Service\n\n<<back>>
The first truly grand mini-golf course I ever played on. I really love miniature golf, so it has a special place in my heart. There are in fact //three// courses here: two 18-hole courses and one entitled "The Monster in the Pines." The monster is the fact that it's 36 holes long; I've played it exactly once, when I was little, and got bored of it by the time we hit hole 22 or so. I want to play the Monster one more time at least. I don't expect to be suddenly enthralled by it. It's more that I want to master it, like completing it is an accomplishment in itself. This mission is on hold until the time comes that I can find a group of people who:\n* understand this idea\n* are willing to play 36 holes of miniature golf in an afternoon\nThe place's name comes from the fact that Tom Mitchell used to play for [[the Colts]] in the seventies.\n\n<<back>>