Monday, April 23, 2007

End of an era

Today I archived 2 of our geocaches and will archive another in a couple of weeks. My heart's just not in it anymore, but it still felt sad because it broke up a series of caches that I had created called the "Sculpture Scramble". I kept the 3 caches that are still in place - the other 2 were muggled recently - and will archive the final "mystery" cache after I give cachers that have found all of the clues a chance to find the final.

I got tired of heading out in the rain and digging through leaves, twigs and banana slugs to maintain my caches over the winter; tired of some of the pissy South Puget Sound cachers that emailed about how I could do the series better. Plus, in my area there are a ton of geocaches and good spots for caches are at a premium. I don't want to keep someone from placing a new cache because mine is still there.

In Washington you can cache year round if you don't mind getting soggy 8 months out of 12. I mind, and so our caching adventures were limited to camping trips and road trips over the summer. We'll still cache when we travel because it's a great way to stop and stretch your legs at rest areas. In fact, in the next few weeks I'll be creating routes to find caches along the roads we'll be travelling in the midwest. However, waymarking is where it's at for team Hikenutty at this point.

We had a great waymarking day trip to the Washington State Capitol and the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge this weekend. We posted 26 waymarks, with 8 in new categories. It was a waymarking bonanza! I'll post about the adventure later this week.

2 comments:

Ambrosia said...

If you get tired of getting soggy, just hop over to the dry side of Washington State, where we have 300 days of sunshine a year. ;-)

I'm sorry to hear that you're archiving some of your caches. It's like having to let go of your children, in a sense.

I'm facing the same sort of thing right now. I have so many caches disabled because of issues, and I am having too hard of a time to maintain them quickly because I can't drive or get out very often. I'm struggling with if I need to archive some, but I love them all! It is very difficult.

I hope you have a good time caching while on trips. That's where I do most of mine, and I enjoy learning about an area by the caches that we find there.

Hikenutty said...

You're right Ambrosia. It should say "In western Washington you can cache all year if you don't mind getting soggy. In eastern Washington you can cache all year if you don't mind heatstroke in the summer and freezing your butt off in the winter." :) I know, what can I say, I'm a weather wimp. I hate being cold even more than I hate being wet and soggy.