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Don't you wish people would write better logs for caches like this? You
could blame my husband for some of the problem if you'd like as he and my
daughter (I won't mention that she's 7) just found both of these caches
last weekend. Normally, even if I don't go, I still do the online log. I
didn't do this for last weekend's adventures. Although, if I HAD, based on
their tales of mishap, my log for them would have sounded somewhat similar
to yours -- except my husband did know how to get to the "right" place to
park. Otherwise, they too tromped 400,000 feet straight up along the
highway and eventually wound up on what they thought was private
property/someone's yard. They lucked out and managed to avoid the Welcoming
Committee.
My hubby did say both caches were in pretty bad shape. I don't know that he
had a problem with them being "buried" -- he did say they were a "PVC pipe
stickin up out of the ground with another container inside."
Feel free to contact us offlist and he'll tell you what he knows!
But, even without a find, I really enjoyed your log!
Nancy
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Well, I have just returned from hunting these two (quite unsuccessfully), and thought that some of you here would appreciate the story.
First off, these gems are in some reserve area called "Emmeneger Park", which is quite literally not on the map. Its kind of in the GPS, but the GPS doesn't really know how to get there:
(a) While at Old Big Bend and 270 (less than 1 mile away) the GPS tells me to get on 270, proceed to 40, go to lindberg, double back, then get back on 270. As we get back on 270, it says "Arriving At Emmeneger Park".
Get off at the next exit; Rinse; repeat. So much for the GPS.
Finally, after generating about an hour of local "off road" GPS looking around, we see a park (name long forgotton), and a reading on the GPS that we are .80mi distant. Great! We figure this must be the place - so we jump out and suit up (boots, kit, etc.).
Directly at where the arrow is pointing is a little trail, which we immediately begin to follow. As we leave, I *meant* to take a waypoint, but for some reason merely cleared the track. This should have been enough, but as you will see later, was anything but.
We follow this trail a few yards and it becomes obvious that it follows the shorline of some huge creek or small river (the Des Peres river perhaps?). So we follow it. Sometimes. Sometimes theres a path and sometimes theres very very dense scrub or washout shorline to follow. At all times we were surrounded by *very* recent deer tracks, as well as some kind of very heavy dog track. This sucker must have been *huge*, cause his prints were deep, wide, and clearly visible in less than wet sand and dirt. This goes on for about another .5 mi, in the 95 degree heat and sun of course! Eventually, it becomes obvious we need to start climbing. When we first began our ascent stage, we were maybe an hour into a moderately difficult hike - not a big deal, but obviously not the way that I would have anticipated a 3/3 cache would normally go. But hell, we're here already, right???
Riiighhttt.....
We start the ascent.
2 hours and 200 feet later, I am a good five pounds lighter and gasping for breath. Any breath at all will be fine! Water would be nice too. Slowbob looks like she's gonna have a coronary any second too. And shes 20 years younger than I am!
Fortunately we found a small creek running through the scrub with what appeared to be clear, clean and potable water. I sure hope it was, cause we drank a lot of it!
The ascent continues. Another hour and a half later we have logged a total of 525 feet almost straight up the face of the riverbank, completely unprepared for such a workout. But hey, the GPS says we're *here*! Yay!
At this point, we've been at this for roughly three hours in the heat. We're *tired*. Really, *REALLY* tired. But, we start the cache hunt. Since there is a clear open space on the trail in front of the cache, we Do The Geodance (recal the compass), make goddamn sure the thing has a bunch of good signals to keep the search radius small, and take the first of dozens of fixes. We are clearly shown to what looks like the exact place I myself would have put the intended prize, a "well hidden, decorated PVC pipe measuring 8"x2.5". We search. In fact, we searched so thoroughly that we literally cleared entire areas of all ground and branch debris for a solid 40 foot radius of the intended target. We had not brought the clipboard with us (we usually don't), but we had both read the description, and we boath remembered the same thing, an 8 inch pipe at the coordinates, no hints. So we just tried to brute force it.
Utter failure. ANother hour gone, four hours into the hunt. Wow am I bushed! We decide at this point that we need food and water more than anything else, so we take the trail in front of us, which leads like 300 feet away to some stretch of highway we've never ever seen before, and start walking back towards the general direction of the car. An half hour or later we are standing at the end of a private road, facing a house, some worker guy, the owner, and his wife. They are looking at us like we are Al-Quaeda operatives too. I try to be nice and explain that hey, we're lost, but we know generally where we need to be (the "tracks" on the GPS clearly stated that our car was where we were now standing!), and would they be kind enough to point us in the general direction of the river?
At the mention of the river the wife gets *really* nasty, bitching that we are on private property, etc. I acknowledge that we have "figured that part out, and are *trying* to rectify it", at which point her husband cuts her off and jumps in (thank god!). We explain that if he can point us to the river, we'll be just fine, and he laghs his merry ass off with "<laughing hard> Oh hell, you can't get to the river from here, thats a STEEP ASS DROP! I tried it myself once, and there aint no way! Try this - go <jumbled directions which would add about anohter two hours of bushwhacking to our already exhaustive trip>." I thank him, but insist I would rather try to the "steep ass drop", and he laughs like a madman and tells us to "go ahead and try it! It's that way!".
We did.
Down we went, and backtracked we went, until, an hour or so later, we were back in our car. Total trip time *so far*, about 5 1/2 hours. We're both exhausted, tired, and very hungry. But we're also really pissed off at not finding these two caches after all this work, so we decide to find a quick source of calories, water and air conditioning for a few mintes (nearest gas station), and then try and trace ourselves back to that road we had never seen before (that the GPS doesn't know exists), and up to the cache for another quick try.
We get watered up in under 10 minutes, and turn around trying to find this place. Forget about the details - we drove over 60 MILES, *completely* within the local area, trying to find that service road! You *have* to be a local to know about it, there's just no other way! Well, we found it at last, about 2 hours later - total time now, about 8 hours.
Again, we search like mad. In trees, under brush, turning rocks, you name it. I put my hands into places I would *never* have thought reasonable...
We tore that place up bad - I mean it. An nothing, no sign of anything. But this time we have the sheets to look at, and we notice that there has been a bunch of confusion about the coordinates, so now, we're MAD. REALLY , *REALLY, KILLING MAD! We figured the coordinates just have to be toasty. But we're not sure yet - I wrote this to get it down on paper before I log the DNFs.
I have never worked so hard for something (supposedly) so simple in my life as I did today. I am just *dead*. Slowbob can barely walk. I *can't* walk! Blisters, sore everything, etc. I just don't know what to do on these two...
At least now we know how to get into the park from the front entrance!
//Alif
-- Yours,
J.A. Terranson sysadmin@xxxxxxx 0xBD4A95BF
"What this country needs is a good old fashioned nuclear enema."
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