AAARGH - Has this ever happened to you?

[+bittsen]

Last night my friend and I started a cache run early on an extinct volcano (OK, it's a really small volcano) with only a few caches on it. We read the cache page on one of the caches and it said that no matter which way you go for the cache, it's rough terrain.

We opted for going up to the cache from the bottom rather than going to the top and working down.

Our first ascent was on a hiking trail, or so we thought, that was heading the wrong direction so we started bushwhacking towards the cache. No dice. The terrain was a little more than we were prepared for while looking at night. So we backtracked.

We found another place that looked more like a mountain goat trail, but there are no mountain goats within the confines of the city so we surmised it was more of a washout. If it had been raining there might have been a small waterfall there. It was basically a mud path that was very steep.

We figured that would take us right up to the cache and so we headed up the hillside. We had to leave the mud path because it was too slippery and instead climb through the foliage (taking care to not cause damage, mind you) and finally made our way to.... a trail. Yup, managed to bushwhack right to a stupid, flat, wide, used to be an actual road, trail. Oh well, we were already headed up so we might as well continue, right? So we kept climbing straight up till we got to close to the cache (which stated to watch out for the drop-off). We managed to find the cache on a nice flat, level plateau sticking right out of the hillside. It was a great place for a cache, really. And to top it all off, it was less than 30 feet below a roadway! Yeah, that's right. We bushwhacked over 200 vertical feet straight up the side of the mud slick hill, just to discover that there was a road less than 30 feet above the cache.

 

Talk about embarassing! I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

 

What kind of silly mistakes have you made?

[+smithdk]

Last night my friend and I started a cache run early on an extinct volcano (OK, it's a really small volcano) with only a few caches on it. We read the cache page on one of the caches and it said that no matter which way you go for the cache, it's rough terrain.

We opted for going up to the cache from the bottom rather than going to the top and working down.

Our first ascent was on a hiking trail, or so we thought, that was heading the wrong direction so we started bushwhacking towards the cache. No dice. The terrain was a little more than we were prepared for while looking at night. So we backtracked.

We found another place that looked more like a mountain goat trail, but there are no mountain goats within the confines of the city so we surmised it was more of a washout. If it had been raining there might have been a small waterfall there. It was basically a mud path that was very steep.

We figured that would take us right up to the cache and so we headed up the hillside. We had to leave the mud path because it was too slippery and instead climb through the foliage (taking care to not cause damage, mind you) and finally made our way to.... a trail. Yup, managed to bushwhack right to a stupid, flat, wide, used to be an actual road, trail. Oh well, we were already headed up so we might as well continue, right? So we kept climbing straight up till we got to close to the cache (which stated to watch out for the drop-off). We managed to find the cache on a nice flat, level plateau sticking right out of the hillside. It was a great place for a cache, really. And to top it all off, it was less than 30 feet below a roadway! Yeah, that's right. We bushwhacked over 200 vertical feet straight up the side of the mud slick hill, just to discover that there was a road less than 30 feet above the cache.

 

Talk about embarassing! I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

 

What kind of silly mistakes have you made?

 

Yes of course doing the hard way has happened to me several times. I remember going after a swamp cache in Mississippi. I was with 2 other people and we had to go through some pretty heavy growth to get to the cache. I actually had to crawl on the ground since it was so thick. I ended up getting a couple fire ant bites while crawling on the ground. Once we got through, we discovered the nice big path big enough for a car. If only we had looked about 100 feet away before venturing into the heavy growth, we would have seen the path that takes us right to the cache.

[+cycler48]

Last night my friend and I started a cache run early on an extinct volcano (OK, it's a really small volcano) with only a few caches on it. We read the cache page on one of the caches and it said that no matter which way you go for the cache, it's rough terrain.

We opted for going up to the cache from the bottom rather than going to the top and working down.

Our first ascent was on a hiking trail, or so we thought, that was heading the wrong direction so we started bushwhacking towards the cache. No dice. The terrain was a little more than we were prepared for while looking at night. So we backtracked.

We found another place that looked more like a mountain goat trail, but there are no mountain goats within the confines of the city so we surmised it was more of a washout. If it had been raining there might have been a small waterfall there. It was basically a mud path that was very steep.

We figured that would take us right up to the cache and so we headed up the hillside. We had to leave the mud path because it was too slippery and instead climb through the foliage (taking care to not cause damage, mind you) and finally made our way to.... a trail. Yup, managed to bushwhack right to a stupid, flat, wide, used to be an actual road, trail. Oh well, we were already headed up so we might as well continue, right? So we kept climbing straight up till we got to close to the cache (which stated to watch out for the drop-off). We managed to find the cache on a nice flat, level plateau sticking right out of the hillside. It was a great place for a cache, really. And to top it all off, it was less than 30 feet below a roadway! Yeah, that's right. We bushwhacked over 200 vertical feet straight up the side of the mud slick hill, just to discover that there was a road less than 30 feet above the cache.

 

Talk about embarassing! I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

 

What kind of silly mistakes have you made?

 

This is what adventures are made of. lol

[+debaere]

The second cache I ever attempted was in France along the Belgian border. It was a multi-cache who's first waypoint was on an old hill created by mining leftovers. We walked half-way around the hill and saw no paths, just the step sides of the hill. We decided to climb up the side of the hill - all 200ft of very steep hillside. We needed to go on all fours for most of it - all of it shale type rock. Once we got to the top we noticed a very nice gentle path leading down the backside of the hill. Oops

[knowschad]

More often than I care to count. While I doubt that my terrain was ever as tough as that sounds like, a caching buddy's motto is that bushwhacking is a great way to find the trail back. I've also done the same thing fishing... hike upstream for hours, hoping to get to a remote, secret spot, only to find a picnic in progress.

[vagabond]

We learned early on to check any caches over a 2 terrain out on USphotomap and then google, it saved a lot a lot of grief and wear and tear on clothing and foot wear

[+Sol seaker]

Oh, I'm really good at making a 2 terrain into a 5. I do it alot.

 

There was one that was almost a drive up I got on the way back to the car. I ended up down a really steep slippery hill, on my way down to the trail that was flat and level with the parking lot.

 

Last weekend i was with a group. I saw a couple guys from another geo-team head up this steep densely wooded hillside, bushwacking. I saw an animal trail and headed up. I got half way up this hillside, and the animal trail was gone. My team members shouted from the bottom that there had to be another way up. I stopped and looked around. Duh. Oh yeah. But I had gone too far to get back down safely. They said they would drive around and meet me.

 

So I headed up. I began to wonder at my sanity as I pulled myself up this steep hill hanging onto trees to keep from sliding down the whole da** mountain. I thought I must be in totally in the wrong area, because the guys ahead of me seemed to have taken a different way and were no where to be seen. I looked at my GPS. 15 feet. YES!!!

 

I found the ammo can in a stump. As I was putting it back, two guys from a totally different team were coming down from the trail. They knew I had not been ahead of them.

"Did you come up THAT hillside?" they said with their mouths hanging open.

"yeah. My friends drove around. Can you tell me how to get to the parking lot?"

[+StarBrand]

I turned a 3.5 mile round trip hike into a nearly 10 mile round trip affair once. Took the wrong fork in a trail and kept stubbornly following it until it was painfully clear I had done something wrong. So I struck out cross country up a mountainside to the cache location. Came across a 70 foot deep ravine and had to skirt around it. Came up againist a 20 foot vertical climb and had to skirt around it. Got stuck on the wrong side of a raging stream until I could find a safe crossing. Got rained on, got snowed on. Had to take shelter for a while. Found myself further from the cache then when I got out of the Jeep. Thought I was going to lose daylight and zero cell signal. Finally got down in a valley and found the cache about 30 foot off the trail I should have followed in the first place. Tired, sore and a bit cold - still had 1.75 miles back the proper path.

 

As soon as I got back to the Jeep - I spotted the trail map with TOPO info and coordinates overlaid on it at the trail head. Wouldn't that have been nice!

[knowschad]

I turned a 3.5 mile round trip hike into a nearly 10 mile round trip affair once. Took the wrong fork in a trail and kept stubbornly following it until it was painfully clear I had done something wrong. So I struck out cross country up a mountainside to the cache location. Came across a 70 foot deep ravine and had to skirt around it. Came up againist a 20 foot vertical climb and had to skirt around it. Got stuck on the wrong side of a raging stream until I could find a safe crossing. Got rained on, got snowed on. Had to take shelter for a while. Found myself further from the cache then when I got out of the Jeep. Thought I was going to lose daylight and zero cell signal. Finally got down in a valley and found the cache about 30 foot off the trail I should have followed in the first place. Tired, sore and a bit cold - still had 1.75 miles back the proper path.

As soon as I got back to the Jeep - I spotted the trail map with TOPO info and coordinates overlaid on it at the trail head. Wouldn't that have been nice!

Geeze, dude... don't leave us hanging, OK? Did you find the cache, or not?

[+bafl01]

This happens to me all of the time. I am an impatient twenty something and i call caches with switch backing that you cant see "young idiot traps".

[+cmatter29]

This kind of thing has happened a few times while out. But I do enjoy making it a little more fun. The best was one of my first I was doing with my cousin. We walked the train tracks down the road until the GPSr said the cache was above us. We looked and there was no trail and no way for their to be a trail there. Being the two that would go out and make trails in the woods while growing up it seemed like a great idea to climb the side of the mountain. After a nice long climb up a rock wall we finally made it to the top and found a trail to be right at the top that led to the cache and right back down to the truck. We took our time on top of the mountain and enjoyed the view of the river and took some time to bandage my hands from all the sharp rocks. Painful and A LOT of work,but it was fun. Sometimes finding your own way can be more exciting then following the path of others.

[+Allanon]

I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

Not sure which volcano you are talking about, but if it has trails are you sure it's not in Moun10Bike's NW Maps set? http://www.switchbacks.com/

[+BCandMsKitty]

Oh yeah.

One that we chuckle over and relate to new cachers when telling them that there is almost always a trail to the cache.

 

Joe's Bush ... we approached the area from the west, along a dirt road. The cache page says parking on the south side of the road, so when the arrow was pointing directly south, we parked and started bushwhacking. Just over a tenth of a mile. Not too bad, except for the wide swaths of raspberry bushes taller than our heads! the kind that stab through jeans like you might as well be wearing shorts! Oh yeah ... tree after tree fallen in an easterly direction (from a wind storm in the recent past) blocking our path and making the bushwhack more like 3/4 of a mile.

 

Got to GZ, found the cache and bushwhacked all the way back!

 

Got in our car and continued east along the road to the corner of the woodlot and guess what?

Yep .... a parking lot with a trail, and map of the trail against which was leaning two walking sticks left by some previous hiker! You know the trail probaly went within 20 feet of the cache GZ!

All we could do was laugh, lick our wounds and carry on, vowing to always look for the trail when hunting a cache in a woodlot.

 

Too bad we don't heed our own advice though........

[+zoltig]

Been there. Done that.

[+WRASTRO]

Every REAL cacher has done something similar but most will never admit it for various reasons. My Son claims he wants to be able to drive like I do when we are caching. I have no idea what he means because I always obey all local traffic laws.

[+popokiiti]

We frequently go the tough way in to a cache....then find the easy way out. Don't feel bad, bittsen - we've even done it in our own municipality, scrambling over and under trees blown down in a windstorm up a steep embankment, completely missing the trail that had been cleared!

 

edit - AND we didn't find the cache

Edited January 5, 2010 by popokiiti

[4wheelin_fool]

It is rather traditional to bushwack to a cache, and then find a trail next to it.

 

ALL caches can be terrain 5, depending on how you approach them..

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

I have upped the difficulty by going the wrong way many times... still do now and then, but much less often than before because I figured out one important lesson... the hider is probably just as lazy as I am!

 

Now when I am faced with extreme terrain, or bushwacking through a field of thorns, I stop and think "Nah, he wouldn't have gone that way, so there must be a better way." and there almost always is!

[+power69]

Last night my friend and I started a cache run early on an extinct volcano (OK, it's a really small volcano) with only a few caches on it. We read the cache page on one of the caches and it said that no matter which way you go for the cache, it's rough terrain.

We opted for going up to the cache from the bottom rather than going to the top and working down.

Our first ascent was on a hiking trail, or so we thought, that was heading the wrong direction so we started bushwhacking towards the cache. No dice. The terrain was a little more than we were prepared for while looking at night. So we backtracked.

We found another place that looked more like a mountain goat trail, but there are no mountain goats within the confines of the city so we surmised it was more of a washout. If it had been raining there might have been a small waterfall there. It was basically a mud path that was very steep.

We figured that would take us right up to the cache and so we headed up the hillside. We had to leave the mud path because it was too slippery and instead climb through the foliage (taking care to not cause damage, mind you) and finally made our way to.... a trail. Yup, managed to bushwhack right to a stupid, flat, wide, used to be an actual road, trail. Oh well, we were already headed up so we might as well continue, right? So we kept climbing straight up till we got to close to the cache (which stated to watch out for the drop-off). We managed to find the cache on a nice flat, level plateau sticking right out of the hillside. It was a great place for a cache, really. And to top it all off, it was less than 30 feet below a roadway! Yeah, that's right. We bushwhacked over 200 vertical feet straight up the side of the mud slick hill, just to discover that there was a road less than 30 feet above the cache.

 

Talk about embarassing! I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

 

What kind of silly mistakes have you made?

I do that a lot!

after i'm where the cache is, i see the path i should have taken.

[+BCSasquatch]

Well, being so new to this and having only found 2 caches so far, my first attempt was a good old fashioned n00b hazing. My son and I were looking for our first find in an off-leash dog area in a huge urban forest. I entered the coordinates and hints with painstaking diligence and we set off to find our treasure.

 

I entered the info inside the house with no satellite lock and didn't think much about it. Knowing the general area I did not turn on my GPSr until we were within a couple hundred meters of the location. I then found to my horror that the GPSr reported the location as being some 65km east of us!

 

Not deterred I rebooted it and low and behold it was now 3 km to the west of us! Getting closer.

 

Well after tossing around several theories, all of which blamed Magellan directly, we tried to find the cache without GPSr.

 

To make a long story short, we got questioned by muggles, made a keen spectacle of ourselves stomping around a clump of trees and to make matters worse we both stepped in dog doo.

 

I later discovered that I had used the wrong datum on my GPSr and the poor thing had no idea what I was on about.

 

I have it figured out now and happy to report I am much more discreet and no longer look for treasure in doggy doo minefields.

 

Definitely a D'Oh moment.

 

Glad to have that one out of the way

 

Edit: We never did find that cache!

Edited January 6, 2010 by lornix

[Chumpo]

I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

Not sure which volcano you are talking about, but if it has trails are you sure it's not in Moun10Bike's NW Maps set? http://www.switchbacks.com/

 

I checked the Portland area, and while there are several areas mapped, there are several that still need to be mapped. Upload those track logs!

 

We are lucky here in Spokane to have the vast majority of trails uploaded already thanks to Moun10Bike and MtnGoat50 (as well as a few others). It is nice to have that information on my gps- it makes bushwacking totally unnecessary 99% of the time.

[+bittsen]

I wish someone had mapped the trails on this little volcano. Could have saved a lot of sweat.

Not sure which volcano you are talking about, but if it has trails are you sure it's not in Moun10Bike's NW Maps set? http://www.switchbacks.com/

 

I checked the Portland area, and while there are several areas mapped, there are several that still need to be mapped. Upload those track logs!

 

We are lucky here in Spokane to have the vast majority of trails uploaded already thanks to Moun10Bike and MtnGoat50 (as well as a few others). It is nice to have that information on my gps- it makes bushwacking totally unnecessary 99% of the time.

 

You are right. I have the NW trails loaded in my GPS but they weren't any help on Mt Tabor. If I had tracking turned on it still wouldn't have helped. I don't know that we were on many trails. ~L

[+brslk]

I have upped the difficulty by going the wrong way many times... still do now and then, but much less often than before because I figured out one important lesson... the hider is probably just as lazy as I am!

 

Now when I am faced with extreme terrain, or bushwacking through a field of thorns, I stop and think "Nah, he wouldn't have gone that way, so there must be a better way." and there almost always is!

 

Exactly! I know I can't be the only lazy cacher out there! can I?

 

Still hasn't stopped me from doing things the hard way too many times though...