Today's Geocache
- Owner: whistler & co.
- Location: N 41° 34.811' W 075° 28.719'
- Log Type: Found it
- Date: 2 December 2006
- Original Geocaching.com listing
Hi, W & Co.!
Believe it or not, Rich and I haven’t gone Geocaching since January. Just too many other interesting activities vying for our time and attention. What, then, drew us to search for this cache? Well, it was really just a coincidental combination of two things: having discovered the “source” of the coordinates very early on and hoping to have a chance to see what the fuss was about … and the fact that we were planning on heading in this very direction this weekend anyway to search for some boundary monuments along the PA/NY border.
For some reason (probably not tree cover this time of year!) signal reception was very spotty when we first began searching. We found ourselves following that arrow along some nice trails which led to interesting ruins, but soon our geo-intuition was warning us that we were probably searching a little “higher” than we should have been. Our GPSr soon agreed with us, so down we went. Another surprise awaited near the gate—turned out to be Hound of fox-and-the-hound and his Mom up from Texas.
The next hour or so was spent chatting and searching. We know our coordinates were correct, but the four of us just weren’t able to come up with the cache. As we’ve now seen from later logs we must have been right on top of it, but frankly I was getting cold and we still had a few hours of survey mark hunting ahead of us. Better luck to us next time! Perhaps we’ll return to this area for squirrel hunting and take another peek for the cache in the near future.
Thanks for an interesting challenge and the chance to meet some famous local cachers!
Zhanna
When you have correctly solved for the source of the coordinates, you will know it! Zhanna and I have seen this method before. But, for us, there was more to it.
At the site this morning, three GPS units kept bringing us all back to the same spot (within roughly a 10-15 foot radius) in spite of some very spotty signal reception. Upon our arrival around 9:45am, Zhanna and I initially found ourselves being led from the gated road toward the top of the hill, where we found some fascinating ruins of abutments and other unknown man-made features. We saw a couple of trails leading to this area so it struck us as being a very likely cache location, even for a 1½-star terrain rating. As a matter of fact, we thought it was/is a great idea to bring someone up here for a bit of a history lesson about the place. I’m still wondering what sort of industrial activities were carried out here! We shortly came to realize, however, that the right location was somewhere down below, where our searching had begun only moments ago.
As we made our way downhill we observed the arrival of two other cachers. We didn’t want to disturb their search efforts at first, but as we approached we conducted the usual cachers’ introductions and discovered, much to our surprise, that this was none other than Chris (the “hound” part of The Fox and Hound team) and his visiting mom from Texas. A pleasure to meet both of you! We exchanged our thoughts about the cache and the location, and then casually joined each other in a more thorough search of the area. Unfortunately, our combined “ground zero” had us in an area that seemed more like a needle-in-a-haystack type of situation for a micro-sized container! There were none of the typical “uniquely obvious” hiding spots we were expecting, except for one that we checked quite carefully (or as much as we dared, considering the unsightly matter contained in a part of it!). This item was a bit off from the coordinates. Even now, though, we are still not sure if we were looking in the correct area, despite our faith in the given coordinates. This one really has us buffaloed!!! Hmmmm… I wouldn’t mind going back for another close look. But on a warmer day, of course!!! 
~Rich in NEPA~
