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Biggest Risk You've Ever Taken Caching


k_statealan

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Anything (out of the ordinary for you) dangerous or stupid you've ever done. A cliffiside one for an avid rockclimber doesn't count. A cliffside one for a non-rock climber would.

 

Me: Hiking a wooded trail at 1 am with sheet ice (it was under 10 degrees) all over the area. Fell once just getting from my car to the trailhead. I ended up walking about 3/4 of a mile and fell a couple of more times over the next hour and a half. Got turned around and took the wrong trail. Fortunately, I have a good sense of direction, there was a near full moon, and some lights from the city were just over the hill. I finally got to a point where the trail split uphill up a very slick trail or downhill running beside a dropoff to a creek. I took option 3: grab onto trees and chop footholds in the ice and climb to the top of the hill. Dropped the flashlight once and it slid 15' back down the hill.

 

Never do anything like that again.

 

And to top it off, the cache was missing. If I had read the logs I would have known that. :blink:

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Here is my cache log for the Skyline the Top cache (GCME5F) I attempted on the 14th.

 

Palm Grunt

 

I drove 512 miles round trip and 18 hours total from Portland, OR to attempt this cache today. I also did two other caches placed near here by the same owner. I had planned to winter camp on the pass to bag about 8 other caches on Hwy 2 the next morning while heading back home.

 

Getting to the base of the cache site was fairly easy once you get to the top of the trail and cross the lake, when frozen. I attempted this one with snow shoes and did great until I got to the base.

 

While climbing the loose powder I was sinking to my waist in some places with my snow shoes on. I had to zig-zag up the slope near the summit. A direct route up the slope was too much work. Once I got near the top I approached a slope of large rock formations. This is where it gets very dangerous.

 

While traversing the slope between the rocks I crossed a small snow shelf and fell on my back due to the loose powder and nearly fell head first down the slope, this took me a few minutes to get back up and get going. Now comes the part that could have cost me my life. 30-40 feet further I was crossing between two rocks when I sank into a snow “crevasse” up to my armpits. To say the least I began to panic. It took me nearly 20 minutes to dig myself out while still wearing my backpack and snow shoes. I had been trekking pretty hard for about 2 ½ hours to that point and was soaked with sweat. I could also tell I had the onset of hypothermia due being wet and the snow falling down my shirt while trying to dig out. I took a weather reading on my Kestrel weather station near this area about an hour before and the temp was 12 degrees, winds 23 mph, and the wind chill was -17 degrees. So you could see my concern for my life due to the weather.

Once I got out of the hole I got a GPS reading and it said I was 91 feet from the cache with 7 feet of accuracy; it was a very clear day. I scouted out the area ahead and only saw a snow shelf about as wide as one of my snow shoes. I took a deep breathe and swallowed my pride and turned around; I did not want to temp fate for a third time.

 

I ended up pulling my hip-flexor muscle trying to get out of the hole and it took me 1 ½ hours to get back down. It was about ½ hour past sunset when I got back to my Jeep.

 

I was told by some of the Stevens Pass personnel that they did not advise anyone to attempt to go to the peak near Skyline Lake due to the snow depth. The snow conditions will only get worse as the snow season progresses.

This would be a great summer or spring cache when the snow is seasoned and packed better. It is much too risky to attempt right now; even to retrieve the Moun10Bike coin that is in the cache. That was my main reason for attempting the cache.

 

I am not logging this as a DNF due to the terrain and weather conditions; not due to my caching ability.

 

I encourage everyone to go to the Skyline Lake and Skyline View caches though.

 

TFTH – Palm Grunt

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Here is my cache log for the Skyline the Top cache (GCME5F) I attempted on the 14th.

 

Palm Grunt

 

I drove 512 miles round trip and 18 hours total from Portland, OR to attempt this cache today. I also did two other caches placed near here by the same owner. I had planned to winter camp on the pass to bag about 8 other caches on Hwy 2 the next morning while heading back home.

 

Getting to the base of the cache site was fairly easy once you get to the top of the trail and cross the lake, when frozen. I attempted this one with snow shoes and did great until I got to the base.

 

While climbing the loose powder I was sinking to my waist in some places with my snow shoes on. I had to zig-zag up the slope near the summit. A direct route up the slope was too much work. Once I got near the top I approached a slope of large rock formations. This is where it gets very dangerous.

 

While traversing the slope between the rocks I crossed a small snow shelf and fell on my back due to the loose powder and nearly fell head first down the slope, this took me a few minutes to get back up and get going. Now comes the part that could have cost me my life. 30-40 feet further I was crossing between two rocks when I sank into a snow “crevasse” up to my armpits. To say the least I began to panic. It took me nearly 20 minutes to dig myself out while still wearing my backpack and snow shoes. I had been trekking pretty hard for about 2 ½ hours to that point and was soaked with sweat. I could also tell I had the onset of hypothermia due being wet and the snow falling down my shirt while trying to dig out. I took a weather reading on my Kestrel weather station near this area about an hour before and the temp was 12 degrees, winds 23 mph, and the wind chill was -17 degrees. So you could see my concern for my life due to the weather.

Once I got out of the hole I got a GPS reading and it said I was 91 feet from the cache with 7 feet of accuracy; it was a very clear day. I scouted out the area ahead and only saw a snow shelf about as wide as one of my snow shoes. I took a deep breathe and swallowed my pride and turned around; I did not want to temp fate for a third time.

 

I ended up pulling my hip-flexor muscle trying to get out of the hole and it took me 1 ½ hours to get back down. It was about ½ hour past sunset when I got back to my Jeep.

 

I was told by some of the Stevens Pass personnel that they did not advise anyone to attempt to go to the peak near Skyline Lake due to the snow depth. The snow conditions will only get worse as the snow season progresses.

This would be a great summer or spring cache when the snow is seasoned and packed better. It is much too risky to attempt right now; even to retrieve the Moun10Bike coin that is in the cache. That was my main reason for attempting the cache.

 

I am not logging this as a DNF due to the terrain and weather conditions; not due to my caching ability.

 

I encourage everyone to go to the Skyline Lake and Skyline View caches though.

 

TFTH – Palm Grunt

Yeah. :blink:

But that would've been a GREAT 'dnf' story!

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well now, if you don't count driving to the cache (the most dangerous activity in caching), i'd say the most dangerous thing i've done is rappelling to a cache, or possibly kayaking to several caches. they didn't feel dangerous since i knew what i was doing. the element of risk is inherent in any outdoor activity. how dangerous it is depends on how prepared you are to engage in the activity. -harry

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The riskiest thing that I can think that I have done is to climb steep and unstable talis fields. Sure, at the bottom they're stable and even fun to climb on, but when you get to the top where the small rocks are they're just too unstable for my taste. Once I was trying to get to a cache that hadn't been hit in over a year, I got to within probably 30 feet of it but the rocks started slipping beneath me,so I started down. At one point the rocks gave way and I slid about 15 feet before I managed to grab a boulder. Scary stuff.

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My son and I had a cache on our "to-do" list for quite some time, mainly because it was in an area that we had found all the others around. But this one required a winding mountain dirt forestry road of about 7 miles, and every time we went for it, the gate was closed. Finally, I started looking at topo maps, and while it was 7 miles of winding road, it was only 2 miles as the crow flies from the locked gate. Appeared to be some fairly steep terrain, but not "un-doable". So off we went!

 

After 2 hours, we had gotten ourselves into an area on the side of a steep mountainside, covered with about 6-12 inches of old snow, frozen on top. We were wet, cold, a bit scared (it was slick and a long way down), and to top it all off, we had only covered less than 1/2 mile!

 

Thank Magellan for Mapsend Topo! I was able to determine that a loop of the forestry road was only about 1/10 of a mile from our current location, and so we changed direction and headed for it. Found it easily and walked back down to the waiting van.

 

About 6 months later, we were able to drive the road (gate open this time, no snow), and get to within 1/4 mile of the cache, so we finally did get it off our "to-do" list!

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Anything (out of the ordinary for you) dangerous or stupid you've ever done.  A cliffiside one for an avid rockclimber doesn't count.  A cliffside one for a non-rock climber would.

As an avid climber - anything with groundfall potential still makes me nervous if I'm unroped. Let's see....heading a mile into a partially frozen swamp wearing snowshoes and waders - only to have a snowshoe come off under the ice about 3/4 of a mile out? Let's see, dangling under a rotten railroad bridge looking for a cache, hmmmm, how about canoeing out to an island only to have to climb a tree to snag the cache (THAT was a fun cache). Taking my whole family to try and find one of BrianSnat's most difficult caches in the area? (we turned around - and I went back solo the next day to bag it). That's part of the fun - pushing your limits!

 

Risks? Part of life. Trick is - choosing your adventures wisely (or even better - having the skills and experience to ensure any mishaps are recoverable!).

 

p.s. Walden - great picture! Get your hips out from the rock - it'll give you better purchase with your feet while you're bouldering! (looks like a neat cache!) :D

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One of the dumbest things I've ever done while geocaching was pretty early on in my adventures, on a cache called "Wolf's Den". I ended up on top of a ridge looking down on the cache. I found what looked like a trail, so I decided to follow it. As I proceeded along the trail, it got icier, and steeper, and less trail like. Had to make the decision whether I should turn back, or forge ahead. Decided to go ahead, and wouldn't you know it, the 'trail' got worse and worse. And of course by that time, going up was about twice as hard as going down, so I figured I'd better continue down. Got to the bottom of the ravine, and found the river in front of me, and no way to follow the bank of the river. Luckily, the river was frozen as well, well mostly, so I edged out to the side of the water, took off my shoes and socks, and waded through the last 4' of ice cold water, only to find no trails anywhere nearby on the other side, and mostly swampiness to content with. By the time I was done, I had no feeling left in my feet, and was still a good distance away from the cache. Rubbed my feat to get the feeling back (somewhat), and put my shoes and socks back on, and thankfully found the cache. Was lots of fun though in any case.

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Here is a log from a cache I did last summer (GCJ2KR):

 

Ok, so I am doing our 150th cache, I thought I would try this adventure. It turned out to be more of an adventure than I bargained for. I parked the car and managed to get to the coordinates for the first stage. Looking under a bush, I spot not the cache, but a curled up rattlesnake. I look around for the cache for awhile, all the while keeping an eye on that snake, to make sure he doesn't bite me. As an archaeologist, I have an inbred fear of them slithery monsters.

 

After about ten minutes of looking for the cache and watching the snake, I spot the cache: literally 2-3 feet from the the snake. I think, oh boy, how am I going to get that without him popping with those monstrous fangs (in reality, the snake was probably about 3 feet)? I could come back later, but I have walked all this way, and I have enough DNFs on my already stained record. I think, maybe this is a dirty trick the Fuqowee is playing on the local cachers. I've seen it done.

 

To test this theory, I toss some small pebbles at the beast to see if it's real. It doesn't move. I look around for a good stick to poke it with, but there was none handy. I inch a little closer, trying to reach the cache, and notice his tongue licking in and out. It's real. Eww. But no buzzing; that buzzing really makes my hair stand up on end.

 

I take a larger rock, and wedge it next to the snake, so that its head is on the backside of it. It must have been sleepy, or cold, because it still didn't buzz. I carefully reached out with my hand and snagged my quarry, did my business, and carefully put the cache back. I stepped away from the area to the next stage with little trouble, though my heart beat faster all the way back to the car.

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Once, right after we got our Jeep, we decided to go after a local cache that involved a bit of offroading. The cache involved about three miles into the woods on a completely desserted "township road" that was more of a trail than a road. If we would have broke down or gotten stuck, quite frankly, we would have been screwed because our cell phone was getting no coverage, no one knew where we were, and chances are, no one would come down that trail for month's (later, we found out that just a day after us, another group had come after the cache.)

 

We, in our just barely modified Jeep cherokee made it in and out with no major problems. The team that went in two days later, were driving a Ford Bronco with lots of offroading modifications, that had traveled on trails that we wouldn't even think of putting our Jeep on. Well, needless to say, they had some troubles, and required $500 or more of body work.

 

A more recent cache had my dad climbing across the girters on an old railroad bridge. As much as I wanted to go with him, I was scared stiff. The river looked high, and I'm afraid of heights, and water, and I can just barely swim.

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Oh, Quoddy, the river is at least four feet deep! ;) I may get the nerve to try that one yet (though I had enough trouble with the trestle...)

 

I was a few feet from a black bear on TPN Trail once. Scared the bejezuz out of both of us! (Coming back from GC5)

 

Lake of the Clouds Hut Virtual was very tough, but not especially dangerous. The way Circles and I did it was as part of the Presi Traverse. Two day hike from Crawford Notch. Six thousand feet of elevation gain. (And another two days to hike out to Pinkham Notch.)

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I guess laying full length on a 4" wide steel beam under a train trestle 70' above a 2' deep river to reach a magnet micro under the beam at yet another full arms length is probably it for me. Cache shall remain nameless. Many cachers will know which one it is, though.

FYI - I will never do a cache like this.

Or one that requires a lot of good balance. I'd fail a field sobriety test sober becaues of how bad my balance is, so I'm not about to dangle upside down for a magnetic micro which I would probably butterfinger and drop anyway.

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My first cache was the scariest and my wife freaked! My friend gave me a print out for this site and the clues were so good I didn't need a GPS or have one. The hunt in Okinawa, Japan took me and 2 of my kids along the side of a coral cliff were you had to face the cliff and go hand over hand in some spots. It was a 30 foot drop off of sharp jagged coral that ended with the ocean crashing up against the cliff. It wasen't to difficult but it was an easy place to trip, the the fall could of killed or hurt one of my kids or me. Looking back I shouldn't of taken my kids. They made it and were pretty proud they did it, but man did I get a butt chewing and rightly so.

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After visiting an area for the third time (2 previous DNF's), I took a risk by laying on the ground and pushing myself under a rock with my hands and toes. It was, of course, in the middle of winter and I had no hat on, or gloves. It was quite a dissapointment when I didn't even find the cache after all the effort. :o

 

The adventure was risky because it was the middle of winter and I got completely soaked; thus risking hypothermia.

 

Good times, though. :rolleyes:

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There are two big risks I have taken while caching. The first was while hunting Daniels cache near Baltimore, MD. I free climbed somewhere around a twenty to thirty foot stone bridge pillar. I climbed it by putting my back against the pillar and my feet against a tree. The other big risk I took was while hiding my Dark cache. Stop reading if you plan to hunt this cache! The cache is hidden in a man made stone tunnel. I spent a couple of hours by myself in that tunnel building what I called hard points. The hard points are to attach the cache to the wall of the tunnel. I built these hard points by mixing PC7 epoxy and forcing it into cracks in the stonework. Then I would force a small chain into the crack with an little bit of the chain hanging out. I know that this dose not sound like much of a risk. However, if you ask any caver he or she will tell you to never go underground by yourself. If I had hurt myself there was almost no chance I would have been found in time. Chances are that if I was hurt in that tunnel, and been unable to get myself out, I would have died there and my body not found for weeks. That being said, I am very confident in my abilities and was able to do the job with no fear.

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There are two big risks I have taken while caching. The first was while hunting Daniels cache near Baltimore, MD. I free climbed somewhere around a twenty to thirty foot stone bridge pillar. I climbed it by putting my back against the pillar and my feet against a tree. The other big risk I took was while hiding my Dark cache. Stop reading if you plan to hunt this cache! The cache is hidden in a man made stone tunnel. I spent a couple of hours by myself in that tunnel building what I called hard points. The hard points are to attach the cache to the wall of the tunnel. I built these hard points by mixing PC7 epoxy and forcing it into cracks in the stonework. Then I would force a small chain into the crack with an little bit of the chain hanging out. I know that this dose not sound like much of a risk. However, if you ask any caver he or she will tell you to never go underground by yourself. If I had hurt myself there was almost no chance I would have been found in time. Chances are that if I was hurt in that tunnel, and been unable to get myself out, I would have died there and my body not found for weeks. That being said, I am very confident in my abilities and was able to do the job with no fear.

Fergus, I've gotta try that cache of yours! Heck, I've been in abandoned anthracite coal mines before, should be prepared for thsi one.

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I've done the usual assortment of stupid things while hunting TupperWare but the riskiest risk was getting caught.

 

Mrs. Okie and I hiked to a cache one evening. The view was very nice. It was warm outside, we didn't have the kids with us, and no one else was on the trail...

 

Whenever someone asks what my favorite cache is, if I'm within earshot of my wife, I always mention that one (without explaining why). It gets me a kick in the shins, but it's worth seeing the look on her face.

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Here's a snipet from a log my brother wrote.

 

Right in front of me was a type of fence blocking my way. It kind of flared out past the edge of the "secret sidewalk" so I had to climb around it, and I am glad I didn't fall because it was really far down.(being dark I had no clue how far it actually was) 20 yards later was another one that one had a hole in it so I climbed through. I found out later that I had crossed a bridge at this point and the fall was at least 100 feet down, WHEW!

 

with no flashlight and no clue where he was

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I'm not big on risks. I'm old and fragile and usually cache alone. Also, I have a vivid imagination: I hear in my mind with startling precision the sound of a shattering femur every time I look at a pile of wet rocks. The very last smiley I won, however, I had to cross this:

 

04409db0-c51a-4539-922c-1cfaf6dcd9c3.jpg

 

Yeah, there's a stone bridge under there, kind of on the righthand side. The rest is a free-floating ice sculpture. A couple of weeks earlier, I chickened out on this one. At that point the bridge was coated in half an inch of wet ice. Later that day, three people went over using the popular but undignified "skooch" method.

 

Showoffy young whippersnappers!

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I've only been doing this for a month and I've already taken too big a risk going for a 4.5 terrain cache without looking at the description first. This one was the last in a series of four caches and the others were easy to find, even if the hike was arduous. They were ammo cans hidden in "artificial piles of rocks." I somehow assumed the last one was like the others . . . Doh!

 

My GPSr said the last cache was only .12 miles away, so I just started following the arrow and the trail. I didn't stop when I had to take my fanny pack off to squirm through a tight place on my stomach. I didn't stop when I was sort of free-climbing on a big boulder.

 

Finally the trail became indistinct and I ended up on a cliff.

 

CliffTrail.jpg

 

The sun was going down . . . but the cache was only 243 feet away. I didn't want to quit . . . however prudence prevailed and I turned around and started the long descent back to the car that was more than a mile and a half away.

 

About halfway back to the car in the looming dusk, I remembered I was in mountain lion territory.

 

Did I mention I cache alone . . . ?

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Telling my wife I will only be gone 1/2 an hour to grab a local cache and coming home 2 hours after stated time. That's the biggest risk. :rolleyes: My bad. Now I try and be more accurate with the time it might take me.

Not telling my wife (Penny Wise) that I've spent over $100 to purchase geotokens in the last month.

 

"But honey, they're GREAT trade items! I might even be able to get one of the personal geocoins I've always wanted by using these."

 

We'll see. We reconcile the bank statement in a few days. I may be banned from the forums for a while... :laughing:

 

S-4-C

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I was in a state park alone one time going after an easy cache and as I topped a hill on the hiking trail I heard some runing through the leaves and I stopped and to my horror it was a Bob-cat about 25 yards away in the crouched position. I had a walking stick, but I was still shaking. I just made myself as big as I could and raised both arms up and started yelling and moving toward the Bob-cat. Luckly it was more scared of me than I was of it.

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