Flashes of Panic

While I’ve mentioned geocaching in the context of a hunt and the reward of the find, a large part of it is community driven. There is something utterly different about standing in the middle of the woods, a fair way from anything deliberate, holding this (relatively) tiny box that someone hid, knowing that they told you the secret of where it was and now you’ve found it. Just as powerful is the thought of the people who found it before you and those who will find it afterward. My father and I both enjoy paging through the logbook at each cache we find. When you do a few caches in a particular area, you start to recognize handles, handwriting, and the kinds of trades people make. You start learning the styles of particular cache hiders. You wonder if people are starting to recognize these things in your logs and your caches.

It’s a funny community that develops, since we seldom actually see each other. Even on a busy weekend, it’s rare and faintly exciting when someone else visits a cache on the same day I do. We walk the same paths, but only rarely do we actually meet in person.

I did some caching with the community in mind on Saturday morning. I went up to South Deerfield and followed the Pocumtuck Ridge Trail from the Mount Sugarloaf auto road around the southeast shoulder of North Sugarloaf and up to the ledge that looks south towards Sugarloaf itself. There is—or was—a cache there called “Valley View Too” which hadn’t been found since last May, though with only one “Did Not Find” logged since then. (Curiously, the caching slang for a failed search, “DNF”, is the same as the runners’ slang for a failed race, where it indicates “Did Not Finish.”)

The caching community only knows the state of a cache by the reports on the website. A string of successful find logs means the cache is probably there and in decent shape (unless the logs indicate otherwise.) A string of DNFs should prompt the owner (who presumably can find it without trouble, since they remember where they put it) to head out and verify that it’s really still there, or, in the case of disaster, clean up the wreckage and list the cache as closed.

I wanted to add another bit of information to the collection about Valley View Too, and unfortunately it was another DNF to the list. I suspect the owner is no longer paying attention—the cache is now a year and a half old—so I requested that it be archived unless someone who knew its actual location could verify that it existed. I didn’t do this lightly; I searched feasible locations within a hundred-foot radius of the coordinates reported by both the original hider and the only later finder to report coordinates (not everyone reports where they find the cache, but considering how inaccurate these things can be despite their precision, I think it’s worth adding to the pool of data.) I spent between 45 minutes and an hour at the mountaintop.

It’s frustrating to log a DNF—I logged another in the afternoon—because it’s not always clear why you couldn’t find it. When you make a successful find, probability snaps into one scenario: successful find. When you DNF, it’s not clear why. Would I have found it if I’d searched just a little longer? Was I distracted by the snake or the flowers (I got pictures—what, I’m not going to enjoy my time in the woods?) and miss looking in the last place where it was hidden? Or is it simply not there, carried off by the owner, a non-cacher who stumbled on it by accident, or even a bear?

The advantage of this frustration is that it raises that question for the community. Hopefully someone else will see that question and set out to answer it.

Meanwhile, I got a great walk on a nice day, and went somewhere I hadn’t been before.

Now playing: Harrisburg from Golden Age Of Radio by Josh Ritter

Update: Two more DNFs were logged on Valley View Too on Sunday, making me feel a bit less incompetent. I am amused, however, that it got two visits in a year, then three on one weekend!