Geocaching Log - Sept. 14, 2007

Cache Overview
1) J-Hawk Hike or Bike Trail @ N 38° 56.401 W 095° 19.455
2) Overlook @ N 38° 54.590 W 095° 19.650
3) Friday the 13th 2 for 1 @ N 38° 54.575 W 095° 19.814

Acquired: Plastic pirate treasure coin, $1 bill
Left: Donald Duck figurine, Stork figurine, Toy car

Caylyn called me on her way home from work asking if I wanted to do some geocaching when she got home, so I was more than happy to look up a few caches for us to visit! These were all locations near the Clinton Lake dam.

J-Hawk Hike or Bike Trail @ N 38° 56.401 W 095° 19.455

Our first cache of the evening involved over a half mile hike along a very nice concrete hike/bike trail near Clinton Lake. We parked near the lake and set foot down the trail with our dog, Thumper, who later proved kind of a pain to go caching with! About a tenth of a mile down the trail, I realized I had forgotten the trinkets in the car, so after a quick sprint back and forth we were able to really get going. After meeting a few rollerbladers and bikers on the trail, we finally got to the point where we had to leave the trail. Leaving a short hike up a hill full of juniper/arborvitae.


Turns out a hike through juniper isn't all that fun, as those suckers poked the crap out of us, especially with a dog in tow (or rather the dog towing us). After a few spider webs to the face, we came across an area of taller evergreen trees with lots of dead branches on the bottom. Caylyn was able to spot the cache hidden under a couple rocks in the middle of all these trees, so we tied Thumper up and hiked through all the dead branches to the cache as Thumper squealed and barked at us, apparently thinking we were going to leave him for the coyotes.


I had expected to find a Kansas Sunflower geocoin inside, but it turned out someone had beaten us to the punch earlier in the day! There really wasn't anything interesting in the cache, so I decided to just log our visit and leave behind a little stork figurine that I had scored at a garage sale earlier in the day. Speaking of which, geocaching has really made my garage saling hobby a lot more fun, as I now enjoy finding crappy little 10 cent items to bring with me as geocaching trinkets! I used to wonder who the crap ever buys that stuff; but I guess that question is now answered.

After hiding the cache away, we returned to our dog which you'd have thought was dying judging from the sounds he was making and hoofed it back to the car.

Overlook @ N 38° 54.590 W 095° 19.650

After a quick mile drive past the dam, we took off for our second cache of the evening...

Hmm, I think I was wrong about wanting to blog all this crap. I hate typing all of this stuff out. It's a real pain in the butt. To me, the fun is in the caching; not writing about it. Maybe I'll just post pictures instead...















Oh those falls @ N 38° 56.571 W 094° 53.262

This cache was just on the opposite side of K-10 from rick's 52 making it another quick stop on my way to Kansas City. As I got out of my car, I could hear the faint rush of a waterfall. Judging from the name of the cache, I didn't even bother switching on my GPS unit and followed my ears and was fairly amazed to find a 20 foot high waterfall gushing over a limestone formation, right alongside a fairly busy street right between Lenexa and Olathe. Who'd a thunk? After spending 15 minutes or so checking out the falls, I decided to start looking for the cache.

Not really knowing where to look, I switched on my unit and was led to a fairly large pile of limestone rocks about 50 feet down the sidewalk from the falls. It took me way longer than it should have but I finally caught a glimpse of the box, which had been very well hidden in the rocks by the last cacher. After clearing out enough rocks to finally pull the box out, I opened the box to find it contained a Jayhawk travel bug that was designed to travel the KC metro area.

It was also interesting that this TB was part of a larger geocaching puzzle. There are some pretty complex geocaches out there that involve much more than simply finding a box in a single location. Attached to this Jayhawk TB was a dog tag with another set of coordinates (presumably for another cache, but possibly not). The trick is that this travel bug was part of a three part TB puzzle. There are two more travel bugs floating around out there with more clues as to the solution. The other clues might contain some sort of code that is required to modify the coordinates I found; they might contain a distance and bearing that I need to travel from my found coordinates; but the gist of it is that these coordinates would probably do me no good on their own. At any rate, I jotted down the coordinates just in case I have the opportunity to complete the puzzle some day.

Since I don't really travel around KC very much, I decided to leave the Jayhawk TB there and chose a toy mini-cooper instead, leaving a small stress relief football in return. After signing the log, I packed the cache back into the rock pile for the next lucky cacher to find and went on my way to Kansas City for some hot hot gaming action with the rest of the gamers at Tabletop Games.