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Hungry Trees


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Does anybody else have any pictures of trees that "ate" things that we've found while geocaching?

 

There is a micro on the back side of this tree that ate a treehouse:

c4d27e11-e686-4616-a6a9-b90bae33e248.jpg

 

The object connecting these two trunks is a very old board. My guess is that this was a seat that was fastened there when the trees were young. That seat would have has a nice view of a nearby pond:

 

8bfbd90a-9c53-47df-a0f4-588b3fd960ad.jpg

 

79110b3d-1884-467c-b9f2-4e66196bdeb6.jpg

 

An old pipe railing around a kiln at an abandoned brick factory in Iowa (there's a virtual and a regular cache nearby) gave me this shot:

 

90554464-c46f-409c-a4bf-65014dd30442.jpg

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I don't have a photo handy right now but I have a cache near a tree that had "eaten" some animal traps - only a bit of the metal is still stiking out. It is quite near the Oregon trail and has left me wondering if some pioneer made it to Oregon ok without the traps he left hanging in the tree.

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I don't have a photo handy right now but I have a cache near a tree that had "eaten" some animal traps - only a bit of the metal is still stiking out. It is quite near the Oregon trail and has left me wondering if some pioneer made it to Oregon ok without the traps he left hanging in the tree.

 

Or maybe he left those traps hanging in the tree because he didn't make it out of Nebraska...

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I don't have a photo handy right now but I have a cache near a tree that had "eaten" some animal traps - only a bit of the metal is still stiking out. It is quite near the Oregon trail and has left me wondering if some pioneer made it to Oregon ok without the traps he left hanging in the tree.

 

Or maybe he left those traps hanging in the tree because he didn't make it out of Nebraska...

:unsure: - I occasionally joke that the original settlers of this area were actually "quitters". Folks that gave up on the hardships of making it to Oregon. Some of the long standing local families strongly object to that observation.

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I came across a tree once that actually ate a cache! someone had hidden a micro that snugly fit into the crotch of a tree, and when I found it more than a year had passed since the last visitors. In the meantime the bark swelled out and pinched around the top of the container so that it could no longer be removed. Given a few more years the cache may have been swallowed completely. I don't think anybody ever got it back out.

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As a child I helped my father remove a tree from a car or vice versa, that had gown to about 4 feet around and was growing from up through the gear shifter. It was a PITA but eventually thay both lost and the field was void of any obstacles. I wish I had a pic to show it. I have pics that would fit this post, just not with me. Maybe when I return to the states

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There is a fairly new Waymarking category devoted to this

Yeah, that category seems pretty sparse. Heck, this topic alone has about twice the number of pictured locations :D

 

Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the coordinates to the caches near the trees in this topic are probably not that of the tree themselves (or maybe they are for some of 'em, who knows), so I'm guessing one can't just copy over the data from geocaching to Waymarking.

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There is a fairly new Waymarking category devoted to this

Yeah, that category seems pretty sparse. Heck, this topic alone has about twice the number of pictured locations :D

 

Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the coordinates to the caches near the trees in this topic are probably not that of the tree themselves (or maybe they are for some of 'em, who knows), so I'm guessing one can't just copy over the data from geocaching to Waymarking.

 

Since I wrote the Omnivorous Trees category on Waymarking, I probably should put in a couple words in this thread...

 

The category is "sparse" because it's just a few months old. Categories grow as people post waymarks to them. One of the waymarks in that category has already made it as a Featured Waymark for the site and appears periodically on the main page as an example to newcomers of what Waymarking is about.

 

Omnivorous Trees are not always easy to find. I have not found one to post a waymark for, yet, and I wrote the category!

 

Waymarking does not conflict with Geocaching. We've had some great new additions to the category recently and I encourage others to post waymarks to this category, as well.

 

Omnivorous Trees

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I hid a micro in this amazing willow oak tree back in '05. I was alone with no measuring device, but it took 4 hugs to get around the tree, so I estimate the circumference at 18-20'.

 

A few months ago logs mentioned that the cache was getting stuck in its nook. I finally replaced it this week and it took almost ten minutes of gentle persistant wiggling and tugging with pliers to remove the old matchstick case.

 

The tree:

7668755b-81da-498b-876d-0550a97668ad.jpg

 

The old cache:

fef6752b-f75b-4c9c-83a5-72fe98d41a29.jpg

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Cool!!! Did it actually take the top off of the matchsafe? That's what it looks like. All that in 4 years.

 

Its ironic that you brought this thread back today. While I didn't grab any pictures, I went back to a park today where I had cached about 3 years ago, and was near a huge oak that has a three-inch wire cable running through it. I was only a couple hundred feet from the tree today... wish now that I had gone over and snapped a few.

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I think it deformed the capsule enough that finders couldn't screw it back on tight, but the log sheets were dry. It was probably easier to extract it in the cold as the plastic was brittle. I broke off 4-5 chunks before being able to wiggle the bottom 1/3rd of the container out intact.

Also good props for those inexpensive walmart match safes.

 

PS it took me 15 minutes to find the thread as I kept searching for eaten instead of hungry. Finally just searched on tree in title. But I did get to read a thread in which the OP mentioned someone getting eaten by a croc while their friends watched in horror from a tree. I guess you do just have to be faster than someone in the group, not the predator. :)

Edited by wimseyguy
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