The morning after a Giga-Event, you might reasonably expect a geocacher to have had enough geocaching for one weekend.
On May 27, 2018, we went looking for two caches from 2001. Apparently, the cure for a day surrounded by thousands of geocachers was a walk into the woods with a few of them.
CanisMinor, djpd1023, bapierson, LEGOexplorer and I were still making the most of our GeoWoodstock road trip. This part of it took us from the Cincinnati area to Louisville, Kentucky. Two short GC codes gave us two very good reasons to extend the journey.
An Early Start at Shawnee Lookout
Our first historic stop was Shawnee Lookout Cache (GC31A) in southwestern Ohio. My photographs put us at the park early that morning, reading the Miami Fort Trail panels before reaching the cache.
This is a place with history far older than geocaching. The Miami Fort Trail passes ancient Native American earthworks above the Ohio and Great Miami rivers. The park’s interpretive material gives a wooded hike another layer: the land had a long story before anyone thought of hiding a container here.
The cache was placed on February 18, 2001. Its listing describes it as Ohio’s oldest active cache and explains the disputed date on another early Ohio listing. I was happy to have a clearly documented February 2001 hide to visit, without needing to settle every argument about the state rankings.
An ammo can in the woods is already a fairly convincing invitation. Add an early GC code and a hike through an interesting place, and it becomes particularly difficult for me to pass up.
CanisMinor’s log gives the stop another purpose: this February 2001 hide filled a gap in his Jasmer calendar, the challenge of finding caches from different months of the hobby’s history. We signed as Team GIGA-T. An old container can mean a different kind of milestone to each person who reaches it.
Our photographs include the group gathered around the open can and another of me holding it among the trees. Seventeen years after the cache was placed, it was still bringing people out for a search and a photograph together. That is a useful sort of history to be part of.
On to Kentucky
Later that morning we were at Tom Sawyer (GC39E) in E. P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park, on the northeastern side of Louisville. This was a substantial move beyond Cincinnati, rather than another stop in the same local park system.
The cache’s listed placement date is March 1, 2001. The park itself opened in 1974 and is named for former Jefferson County Judge/Executive Erbon Powers “Tom” Sawyer. The name has a local history behind it, as well as an obvious literary association.
The large screw-top plastic container in our photograph is marked TOM SAWYER. Its listing preserves an interesting bit of maintenance history: the original hide used a Rubbermaid container, and an ammo box replaced it in 2004. By our visit there had clearly been another change. The old GC code had survived while the practical business of keeping a cache available continued.
I like that detail. A long-lived cache depends on people checking on it, replacing things and keeping the search possible for the next visitor. By the time we arrived, we were benefiting from years of that effort.
CanisMinor also preserved our soundtrack in his log: he played “Tom Sawyer” and “My Old Kentucky Home” on Spotify while we signed. That is the sort of detail a find count leaves out. We had brought a small musical accompaniment to an old Kentucky cache.
Why Stop for the Old Ones?
My original logs describe a trip full of scenery, company, Donut Trails and geoart. These two finds supplied a different pace. We had a reason to leave the car, walk through the woods and find something with a connection to the hobby’s earliest years.
The numbers were modest compared with a long geoart run: two historic hides. But both had names and places I would remember, and both gave us a photograph with the people who had come along.
After the scale of GeoWoodstock, that made a satisfying companion adventure. A few friends, an old cache and an ammo can in the woods still work remarkably well together.
Field Notes
- Adventure: May 27, 2018; Shawnee Lookout before Louisville.
- Companions: bapierson, CanisMinor, djpd1023 and LEGOexplorer.
- Historic finds: Shawnee Lookout Cache (GC31A) · Tom Sawyer (GC39E)
- Placement dates: February 18, 2001 and March 1, 2001.
- Places: Shawnee Lookout, Ohio and E. P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park, Louisville, Kentucky.
- Photographs: Steven Pierson.
No comments:
Post a Comment