Geocaching Leather-man

Just in case I haven’t said this before, I love this hobby. I have had nothing but good things happen so far and this may be one of them but it will take awhile to see just why:-)

On June 11/2006 we hid our second and third caches. The last one was the best one I have seen to date. We where hiking into a trail about 1.25 miles up the trail I stepped off to look for a hiding place. I found a couple possibilities and as I was getting things ready for the chosen spot I turned to get my notebook and there it was, the perfect spot.
I grabbed my things from where I thought I was going to do the hiding and moved them to the new location. Here is an image of my GPSr laying right in top of the hiding place:

The image above is what you would see coming from the trail to ground zero where the GPSr is laying. Here is another shot of the hiding spot from another angle with the 30 caliber ammo can in place:  

The image above is what you would see coming from the trail to ground zero where the GPSr is laying. Here is another shot of the hiding spot from another angle with the 30 caliber ammo can in place: 

Here is the ammo can peaking out of it’s new home:

We came home and listed the 2 caches we hid and waited like kids on Christmas eve. I just couldn’t wait to hear what people would say about trying to find the one above. The next morning I got an email saying one was approved, but not this one so I waited some more. Finally, on Monday evening I get the email. It said my brand new, perfect hide had been archived because I was on the NY State High Tor Wildlife management area property.

I knew I was on state land but I was sure I was off of the WMA by at least 150 feet, so I drove down to the DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) offices to give them the GPS coordinates so they could check the location and give me permission. Well, it looks like they added a 200 foot strip to that edge of the WMA and I had placed the cache 100 feet inside of that area.

I felt my heart drop. I don’t remember feeling so down and out about anything since my dog died. I waited until the next day to make the hike and retrieve my container. When I did I looked around and found a couple of other places off of the WMA but nothing as good as I had above so I just packed it in and came home.

In my talks with the DEC they mentioned passing the “No Geocaching” rule a year or so ago. They wouldn’t say why but my guess is they are trying to work out a way to make some money on this hobby that’s taking off. Only time will tell. I am keeping all of the information on the hide above so if they do open it to caching, I’ll be back there the very next day.

Happy Caching!!!

I spent a lot of time hiking the hills and trails in this area trying to find a challenging and scenic place to hide our first cache. Here it is:

 

Here is a shot of just the view from the hiding area:
 

We ran into a small problem as we were hiding it though.
After picking the spot, filling the container with log book, swag and notes we made the 1.25 mile hike up the side of this mountain and looked for the perfect hiding place. I saw the spot and went to hide the ammo box and get the coordinates for the geocaching web site and low and behold….There was another ammo box there. I got out the log book and read every entry. It seems that it was the end stage of a puzzle cache and because of that it didn’t show up on our cache maps. After hauling all of our things up there I wasn’t about to call it quits so, we signed the log for the cache that we found and went up the trail the required 528 feet and we were just about to another, even better, location.
This location is the one in the images above. So instead of hiding one today, we found one and hid one and found an even nicer place to put our first one.