Flashes of Panic

I’m still working on finding all the caches within ten miles of the apartment. I’m down to four; one I tried and failed to find on Saturday, one is “temporarily disabled” until the owners have a chance to maintain it, and a third is a “webcam cache” where the webcam isn’t currently working.

I tagged another one yesterday because I felt like a real challenge. It was a “multi-cache” which involves finding a few micro-caches, each of which contain the coordinates to the next stage. This was a three-parter, but there was a hitch: the coordinates were encoded in a bar code. To get the coordinates for the next step, a cacher had to either have their own bar-code reader (a Cue Cat would do for anyone who still has/had one of those) or take the codes over to the nearby Leverett Village Co-op and have them scanned there. (The cache owner, in this case, works at the co-op, which is how he knew this would work.)

I took the third route: I did some web research on bar codes, figured out how to decode this particular format (and a few others along the way,) and did them by hand, on the fly. (Yeah, let’s get it over with now: “What a geek.” Moving on…) First, I knew the format of the codes; I didn’t have to check for all thirty-six possible characters which can be encoded in this format, just N, W, X, ., and ten digits. Also, since I knew the spread between the stages wasn’t going to be that great (maybe four square miles of area) once I’d decoded the first one, I really only needed to look at four characters of each subsequent one: the unit arc-minutes and the three decimal places. That simplified things tremendously.

Of course, all you need to do is goof once, and you’re a few hundred feet away in the wrong direction, and I goofed more than once. Fortunately, I was able to recognize when I’d screwed up, and recover.

And, in the end, it was pretty cool to be standing up near the top of Brushy Mountain, having walked hiked more than a mile from where I could reasonably leave the car, looking at a cellar hole with the owner’s name still on the sign in front. Judging from the size of the trees growing in the basement, the house had been gone forty or fifty years.

Curiously, I had more wildlife encounters on Saturday. I’ll post the pics if I have time.

Now playing: Little Wings from Five Stories by Kris Delmhorst