After Jeremy's arrival home from a week in Attu, we optimistically went out in search of more caches today. We logged the coordinates for 4 that we wanted to try.
The first, is called "Horny Bird" located at the Buskin River about a mile from our front door. Convenient, no? The GPS led us to a little creek washout near the mouth of the Buskin. I love how this activity can lead us to places on the island that we would have never experienced. If we were to just have been walking down the beach, I would have never thought twice about where the water was coming from as you have to hunch over and step up a few rocks to enter the separate world of this washout. It's like going from the beach to a forest in a couple of steps. There are plenty of GREAT hiding spots for a geocache, but after extensive search, we came up with nothing. It's really a shame because it's such a clever area to hide one, and to come out not having found it is disappointing. On top of that, most of the pictures I took of the area got encrypted because our memory card is wigging out. I got a GREAT picture of a C130 coming straight towards us after just having taken off, and it turned out awesome, but when I transferred it to my computer, it didn't want to show up for anything. :(
Off to the next geocache. We went out to Ft. Abercrombie in search of "The Pill Box." The coordinates led us down the Wildflower Trail which we had been down on our own before. It's a beautiful hike. After a little while, it appeared we had gone too far, so we back tracked all the way to a little "animal trail" through a meadow towards the ocean. It's a bit of a bushwhack to get through the poky vines, but we made it. To our right there was a lone tree which we searched extensively through. We are right at cliff's edge and searching everywhere we can think of, but you guessed it from the title...no luck. It's also pretty windy out and it's getting annoying looking for it when we're on a cliff-side trying not to get gusted off to our death by the wind.
Disappointed, we left and went in search of number 3 of the day, "Walk This Way." Not knowing this was amongst many muggles, we were led to a public walking/bike path on one of the two main roads here in Kodiak. Feeling optimistic, however, we found a place to park and went in search. As you can clearly guess, we found nothing but litter. There were some decent hiding spots, though.
At a score of 0 for 3, we started doubting our skills as cachers, and we thought surely we can't not find another one. So we went in search of our 4th cache. "I see a buoy" is it's name and we were led to the marina along another public walkway between businesses and houses. A few park benches and some bushes later, we found nothing and decided that the urban caches are too risky to find because of numerous factors. First of all, the bushes we searched in are upkept by either the houses in the area or the city itself. Meaning, it's someone's property that shouldn't be messed with in the first place. Kids play in the area so a kid may have found and kept it, or a maintenance person may have thrown in out thinking it's litter, or the wind...or the tide water may have displaced it. All I know is that 0 for 4 is disheartening and these urban ones are no fun. It seems like a sport that means getting back to nature, not snooping around people's property lines. I, for one, don't really want to be approached by a police officer asking what I'm doing snooping around some bushes. The only thing we did see was the buoy.
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