Week 6 Prompt II Retry

Bald Mountain sounded like an unusual place. My sister and I were going to go up Bald Mountain with our cousin to go geocaching, which is looking for a box of items using GPS coordinates and hints.

The climb was at a high gradient, which was not a problem for me, though we did stop every now and then. The view down was amazing, as there were hardly any clouds in the sky, so the view of the trees and hills beyond was a brilliant green.

We reached a point where the GPS led us off the trail, and we began looking about the trees. We looked around for a while. It was supposedly a 4 star relatively difficult one, and the hint said to look up, which suggested that it was in a tree. After ascending a few trees, we gave up for the moment and continued to the top.

Once there, we looked for the other geocache. A little way in, we discovered a cabin that was probably the fire watch cabin. It was in quite dilapidated condition. It had a mattress torn apart and scattered all over the cabin, there were wasps nests on the ceiling, the door had mysteriously vanished somewhere, there were beer cans and potato chip bags scattered about in the other general filth. It smelled awful, so we took a few pictures of us standing inside, then scrounged about outside the cabin for the geocache.

We looked for probably ten or fifteen minutes, and had pretty well given up when I spotted it under some rocks. I dragged it out. It was a plastic tupperware style container, soggy with slugs and things on the outside. I opened it, and some muddy water sloshed out. The way geocaching is conducted is that you can take something from the cache, and replace it with something else. There was not much in this soggy container we wanted, like the indistinguishable one-time deck of playing cards. We took nothing from that one, though my cousin put some trinket or other inside. We returned to the first geocache we had looked for, and commenced are search for this 4 star one again. We looked in more trees, went down to the edge of the cliff dropoff, came back, eating blueberries. Once again, we had pretty well given up, when my cousin spotted the container under the ground level branches of a pine tree. He pulled it out, and we exchanged a few things, as fortunately this container was not soaked.

We then returned, victorious in two geocaches. Later, my cousin looked at the geocaching site, and found a comment from someone saying "I found this cache, but it was in a tree, and I thought that was really dangerous and not right, so I moved it to the ground. I just realized that some people might have difficulty in finding it now. Sorry."