Kinnickinnic Caching III

This is Boss' leg after geocaching in Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin.  It was unmarred before he started.  And if you think this is bad, you should see what one of those nasty brambles did to his face.  Geocaching is not for the faint of heart.  It's a violent, brutal, sport.

 

I can't believe how unscary this picture looks.  I was very paranoid about stepping out on this tree.  It's about 3x longer than it looks.  It's about 5x higher off the ground.  And it's about 20x less stable.  I'm not making that up.  I'm not generally nervous about stepping out on edges and structurally unsound things, but I was nervous about this tree.


Left.  Box.  Right.  Box.  Boxes everywhere.  You want some box?  Go anywhere but straight ahead and you'll get yourself some box.  Me?  I like box.  This sign made me very happy.  There's a map in case you get lost on the way to the box.


SMAH!!!!  Or SAHM!!!!  Something like that.  This is a letterbox.  The idiot's geocache.  Who has time to carry a stamp with them?  Oh...that's right.  BOBCAM does.  We saw his stamped signature all over the place.  I have no doubts that if you want to pull down caching numbers in the tens of thousands, you have to find ways to streamline.  This is one of the nicer letterboxes I've seen as it really did double duty as a cache. Only three stamps in the log book, however.  Sort of sad given the love and attention lavished on the box.


I WILL HUMP THE S*** OUT OF YOU GEOCACHE!!!  We've all seen those humping tortoise videos.  Don't pretend you haven't.  This is one very confused tortoise.  It's probably the camo.


Oven top.  We took the roundabout route to this one.  Sort of walked in a spiral that narrowed in on it only to realize it was only about 100' off the main path on a tributary path.  Strange object to find in the woods.


Boss, being all serious about his geocaching.  Or offering me something from his bag of crack.  Hard to say. But the context implies geocaching.


Tigger!  Fortunately, there was no Pooh in the cache.


This was a fun one.  The cache is in the handle of the shovel - it had a name like "I dig this park".


Moe the Sleaze was here!  I showed this picture to Eryn and then had to explain what a sleaze was.  Chaymus (from work) asked me how I explained "sleaze".  I tried to tell her it was sort of the boy who paid you too much attention, but if you were older than 8.  And who told jokes you shouldn't be listening to.  I admit, it was a rather loose definition that wasn't "some guy who caches".


There's a cache in that tree.  Part of our day took us completely around this prairie grass area.  Quite the hike.


That is a plunger.  Did you know that a plunger fits perfectly over a peanut butter jar?  It's like how your hand, at the middle finger, is exactly the size of your mini me.  Or your reach is your height.  Or your foot length corresponds to your IQ.  Or the cc's in your mouth are exactly the cc's of your balls.  It's true...  Don't believe me?  Try it.


F-in bird caches.  They always scare me.  You're looking and looking and then there's a bird next to your head and you're worried you've caught some bird-borne virus.


Guess!!!  It's a cache .........  cache ......  cow!  Looks like an ornament.  Boss and I discussed that we should put out a temporary cache at Christmas that has about a thousand ornaments, each with "look at the blank ornament"  inside a container.  If you're really lucky, you manage to start a few reads from the end.  If you're unlucky, you start about 200 reads from the end.  Brutal.  A multi-cache on a single tree.


I don't know why.  It's a screw for a boat.  It's in the woods.  There's no water.  There are no boats.  But there weren't any cows or toilets either.  Wait...scratch that.  There were toilets.


See.  I s*** a cache.  Don't I look blissfully happy turtling something larger than my head into a bed pan?  Since the surgery, I have the balloon knot of a superhero. I could pass a dozen caches and still be relaxed and ready to hike the next tenth of a mile.

Excellent day of caching.  It's good to set a personal record.

Kinnickinnic Caching II

As I mentioned earlier, Friday was a big geocaching day.  Boss and I found 36 caches.  At least I found 36.  He found 37 with the one I pointed him to in Prescott.  We did our caching at Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin, which may be the very first time I've ever paid to cache.  And out of state visitor fees at that.  It cost us approximately $0.33/cache, or half that if you count each cache twice because there were two of us.   We noticed Bobcam hadn't been there until recently, which seemed strange, but it was my hypothesis that he's a nonresident as well.  If you do like 30,000 caches at .33 each, that's $10,000!  That's a semi-expensive hobby.

 

Despite it being mid-March, the park was beautiful.  Very nice for hiking.  I only found one wood tick.  Yep.  Wood tick. You heard me right.  Little Scony bloodsucker.  Isn't it disturbing that such an idyllic setting has a dark side?


Our first cache was a multicache with a phone.  This was next.  Bear with a butt plug.  I kept the highlander keychain.  That's the coolest swag I've found in quite a while.  I left behind oodles of beads.  Not the usual plastic zombies I leave behind, but I have this giant box of caching stuff to unload for which I've swapped zombies in the past, so it's time to put it all back out in the woods.  If you see topless women running around Kinnickinnic, you can thank me.


We did two mystery caches.  Usually those are evil and difficult and may even require access to the internet if you have to figure out the years of the movies of all the Bond girls.  But I researched these before we went, and they involved reading a plaque.  Boss was quick to point out that Clyde L. Butch Wolf was only 54 when he died, which meant we had a mere decade left.  I think he was killed by a tick.


The other mystery cache plaque.  It seemed brand new, and yet someone had already tried to carve a heart in it.


F the law!  I do what I want!  You don't own me!  And we got away with it too.


Yum!


Near the park plaque.  The view for which the park is famous.  In Wisconsin circles at least.  Almost looks like something you'd see in Oregon.


Monkey paw!  Make a wish!  I wish I find the next cache and that it's not down a steep, muddy, hill, into a scary ravine, and then up an enormous, muddy hill infested with nasty brambles, only to find a trail right next to it when I get there.  Stupid monkey paw.  Didn't work for s***.


Near the overlook.  We got off trail after this one as well.  General rule of thumb, if you're climbing extremely large hills, you're probably doing something wrong.


Except this hill.  This is the "easy" hill after taking the difficult way to find the cache at the bottom. I'm not sure if you can appreciate it from the photo, but we had to take two microbreaks on the way up.  I blame the elevation and thin air.


Down at the bottom is the St. Croix river.  It has an inlet for swimming which doesn't get much water flow, so it was still frozen.  Enough for these geese, but not for us.  Looks a bit like a glacier.  I'm not sure what the geese were up to - mostly just staying away from us.


To be continued...me on a toilet, any way to the box, and Moe the Sleeze.