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Wow... almost went real bad for me today.


Suspect2

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Well, I was out caching alone on my day off and my very first cache I got a real nice surprise that could have went very badly.

 

See my log here for details http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?luid={600AD8B7-CCAA-469D-BF37-B0B9C0861282}

 

So there I was just about waist deep in mud and I couldn't move. My cell phone was in my lower pocket in the mud, I had my pager, badge/ID and glock around my waist just barely out of the mud and I was stuck!

 

LUCKILY, I was able to get my finger tips around a near by tree to dislodge myself. It was quite a struggle and very scary since I was in a very secluded area. Anyone else have a story like this or a close call?

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My story pre-dates geocaching, but when I was in high school I was on a scout trip along the coast of the Olympic Penninsula in Washington. The trail went right through the middle of a bog. When it wasn't waist deep freezing water, it was knee deep mud. Getting a shoe sucked off the foot was a constant concern, but we made it and had the stories to tell afterwards. LOL

 

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. The rest go geocaching.

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I have a similar mud story,, only got upto my knees, but it was easy to see how you can get stuck in mud.

 

This is the last 3 paragraphs from my log on

this cache:

 

"Hmmm now which way did I get in here? No problem I can hear the cars on the road, I'll just head out that way, tra la la, winding my way through the maze with several dead ends. I thought, wow the ground is pretty soft, I should mention hiking boots in the log.... GGGLLLLLCH. What the?!?!? Mud! and I am up to my shin in it, pull my foot out, leaving my sneaker behind, so I grab for my shoe, while my other foot sinks knee high into the mud. Visions of archeologists, thousands of years from now, finding my body encased in a block of dirt, holding a strange gadget in one hand, and my shoe in the other, run through my mind.

 

After a few sock-footed steps with my shoes (yes both) in my hands, I'm out of the mud. now I have to put the shoes back on, eeek, and eventually find my way back to the car, (geesh it's only 500 feet!).

 

There is NO way I'm getting into my car covered in mud, so I go around to the back of my CR-V take my used-to-be-white-but-now-very-black shoes and socks off, reflect on what a great idea it was to buy the rubber cargo mat last year, then take my mud soaked pants off and get in the driver's seat in my underwear and bare feet. Yes I drove the speed limit all the way home, can you imagine getting pulled over? There's a conversation with a cop, that I could do without.

 

So glad it was a secluded parking spot. Had a lot of fun, very cool container, Thanks for the hunt!"

 

It wouldn't have happened if I just tried to go out the way I came in, nobody else has had mud problems there, (of course I was there at night).

 

___________________________________________________________

If trees could scream, would we still cut them down?

Well, maybe if they screamed all the time, for no reason.

Click here for my Geocaching pictures and Here (newest)

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A couple weeks ago I was out night caching alone about 0100hrs. I was looking for a small cache hidden around a cattle stopper on a rural Idaho dirt road. Those of you not familiar, it is a series of metal bars across a roadway to prevent cattle from walking across them and escaping a pasture. Well I took a mis-step and stepped right between the metal bars and wedged my right leg up to my thigh in between the bars. I hit my shin really hard and thought for a moment I had broken my leg. This road is not frequently traveled, So I had the worry I was going to be stuck there all night, holding a gps in my hands. And wondering what I would tell the motorist that finally passed by. Hmm, "Hey mister", "never mind the broken leg","look over there and see if there is an altoids container under those weeds", "I thought so, I have been looking at that spot all night now, Ok, bring it to me and let me sign that log inside while you go call an ambulance and an extrication unit".

 

Feeling finally came back to my leg and I was able to pull myself free after a couple minutes. Then like any good cacher, I limped over to that spot and found the cache. Gotta love this sport.

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I had an awesome experiance last week searching for "Coquitlam Airport"... Well it started with the whole fact (that i later found out)... My GPS was bouncing around preaty badly... i was 1m away from the cache aparently.. in over 18 diferent places in a 100 m radius... So wandering around in cirlces for a few (2) hours after i had finaly given up... And practicly thrown the GPS in the nearby river.. (not really) I was crossing a log.. (taking the hard way across... considering there was a bridge 50m down) about 2 m away from the shore, i decided to leap towards the shore, My foot sliped of the log, and i started slowly tipping over, as leg was in knee deep, and in i went ( I was weight training at the time... so i had my 90L Backpack on, Filled) So my hand is sticking out of the water, Clutching my GPS, while i just got straight in. So as i stand up i find out i landed directly on, a pile of roting dead salmon... That was Great. I VERY Quickly Run out of the river, and start walking home... (note it was around 0 degrees at the time).. Yup.. Fun eh?

 

--Alsid Prime--

GeoCaching for a goal.

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I had a similar expirience before geocaching also. We were hunting ducks (suprise) on a pond by Buffalo, WY. The water level was only approx 2 1/2 feet deep, but covered enough mud to swallow up anything that wandered into it... sooo....we decided we had to get to these cat tails on the other side of this part of the pond.

 

My hunting buddy, being of signifigantly smaller size (not much shade in his shadow), just walks across with nothing more than occasional sucking noises while setting out decoys. I made about 10 feet when the 2 foot of water and sinking in the mud finds me up to mid thigh in the mud and water, sinking at an alarming rate. So, I try to pick up one foot and it gets stuck about 1/2 way up on my attempt to take a step, so I try to other foot. So, here I am with one foot stuck part way up in the mud, knee bent, when the other foot stops in the cruel grip of the mud.

 

Both of my feet now stuck mid step in the mud, I start to fall face first into the muddy water. My friend was quick enough to be able to get my shotgun and stand there laughing at me as I struggle. As stated before, the mud did not offer much support, so each time I tried to steady myself, my arms go right into the mud, offering no more than a gulp of air before I am lying in the water face down with my feet still stuck in the mud.

 

My friend starts heading for a spot to empty his hands to help me get out of the mud. The decoys that he had been placing on the way across are all around me, and I am making a few waves trying to get out of the mud, when one of the cruelest acts of nature that I have witnessed occured. We had not seen ducks all day, and now a couple of dozen (seemed like a scene from the Birds to a man breathing swamp mud at the time) Green winged teal land all around me in the decoys and I swear they were laughing while trying to figure out what was the big duck doing making all the ruccus.

 

Needless to say, I was enough of a distraction that they didn't notice my buddy trying to get my gun sat down, when he yells "Don't move, I'm going to shoot!". I guess the ducks realized that the foreign sounds emminating from the big duck were not welcoming calls and decide to get a better look from a long way up in the sky.

 

So, we finally get me unstuck, and the laughter subsides to giggles. Meanwhile, I stink like a wet dog that has been chasing soft brown sticks in a sewage lagoon. At times, I still can hear those demented duck laughs in my nightmares and wake up smelling that nasty water.

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On the opposite end of the stuck-in-the-mud-but-all-worked-ok story, I was stationed in Astoria Oregon as a helicopter rescue swimmer with the Coast Guard in the mid 80's. One fall morning I was with a helicopter crew that went out on an overdue, a search and rescue case where people have not returned or are missing. Anyway, we found husband and wife, stuck in the mud, both almost equal distance from where they got out of their small boat on a mud flats and tried to walk to shore. Unfortunately, both had expired from hypothermia. They were both rather large, and probably out of shape and unable to get to the high tide line and probably safety. It was very difficult to extract them from the mud.

Being stuck like that can be a very dangerous thing. Hypothermia is a very real killer, with no respect for ignorance. Always a good idea to let someone know where you're headed, and when you can be expected to return. I spent almost 20 years looking for people who hadn't done something like that.

 

OK, off the soap box Rick.... :)

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Well, some of these stories are pretty hairy. Geocaching got us two messy situations this summer:

 

1 We were attacked by yellowjackets (but no one AFTER us was, which is odd) (see link Life is Good, Andover MA )

 

2. Our dogs jumped off a huge boulder and one was seriously injured (see link Quartz, Londonderry NH )

 

Both stories have happy endings. None of us are allergic to yellowjackets (thankfully, Jessiepillar was stung at least 9 times) and Kingerdog had no broken bones or internal injuries.

 

And we cache on.

 

Nothing like finding a dead body though! Squick!

 

--christine screamapillar

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We did a cache last weekend that got us really spooked.

It was a 1/2 mile hike up a trail from the road. Along the way (about half way to the cache) we passed through a gravel quarry.

We reached the cache, and did our logs & trades and just as we were headed back down, gunfire erupted from the quarry.

There was no way we were going to be able to go back down the trail with folks doing target practice, as the quarry was set up for folks to fire UP the trail.

With 2 small children, a lot of spooky things go through your minds when you're alone in the woods faced with gunfire.

We eventually decided to traverse back down the rail along a river front area, which ended up being a lot of fun and we all kind of forgot the incident.

Still, it makes me wonder if the cache placer thought about the possibility of people using the quarry along the way as a firing range when he/she placed the cache. Would he/she have placed it if they thought they were putting people in danger?

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Well I HOPE my most recent cache DOESN'T become a "real bad" one.

It is called "Hells Gateway Caves" (GCH8Y8).

Its an interesting area of caves in Gypsum, where there are many sink holes in the ground (some that drop straight down 50' like a well - see photos). The cave itself is very inviting but potentially dangerous. I just hope the geocachers who go there use common sense.

vanGO-->

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We've had lots of near-misses, potentially bad situations including snakes, spiders, drug-dealers (urban caches worry us much more than wilderness ones!), hidden drop-offs, etc. Our recent encounter with yellow jackets was probably the one that freaked me out the worst. We cache as a family and were 45 minutes into our hike when we were attacked. And I do mean attacked. The yellow jackets were extremely aggressive and followed us back up the trail for about a tenth of a mile. My 3yo daughter was stung twice, I was stung twice and my 6yo son was stung once. We were in a pretty remote area with no cell phone reception and had no idea where the closest hospital would be. Fortunately, none of us stung had a reaction but I did discuss the incident with our family doctor and now have a presciption for both an adult and pediatric epi-pen. We do a lot of hiking and camping in remote areas and although I doubt we'll ever need to use the epi-pens, I feel better having them available. We also carry Benedryl and other first-aid equipment. BTW, we did find the cache!

Edited by GeoStars
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This past summer we (mom, dad, 12yo daughter) did a cache that turned into a 7 mile loop. We were about 3 1/2 miles into it when we heard the unmistakeable rattle of a rattlesnake. Looked down to see the snake on the trail inches from our daughters foot. :ph34r: I (mom) ran forward, dad and daughter ran backward and there we were with a very angry rattler between us on the trail. Once we calmed down we tried to get him to go away by throwing rocks at him but he would not leave! The brush on either side of the trail was very thick and there was really no easy way around. Finally dad suggested daughter get on his back (which she did in about two seconds flat-didn't have to ask her twice! She was actually almost up on his head) and dad bushwacked around the snake hoping all the while not to find the rest of the snakes family. We were able to hear that snake for about a mile down the trail. It occurred to us later that we had not brought a cell phone and were miles from our car. Pretty scary. :lol:

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I had a similar experience several years ago while canoeing the Arkansas river here in Kansas. My brother and I had stopped on a sandbar for lunch, and I was doing some exploring. I stepped off the downstream end of the bar, right into a pool of quicksand. I was up to my shoulders in seconds, screaming at the top of my lungs for my brother. Fortunately, he came running with a canoe paddle and was able to get one end to me. We struggled for about half an hour with no luck (except to keep my head above water). That's when two canoes came around the bend and spotted us. In them were 4 football players from the local junior college. Since my brother was exhausted by this time, the football players took matters into their own hands, and had me out in about 30 seconds....minus my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear! We finished the 10 mile trip downriver with me wearing my shirt tied around my waist and nothing else but a sheepish grin when we'd pass other people. That is not the first time my brother saved my life (one other time involved getting stung by yellow jackets and going into anaphylactic shock), but those are other stories for another time.

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