"Night Caches"

We had our first "night caching" experience last night. Most of you are probably like what in the world is that! Let me explain. Normally, during the day, we go look for geocaches, which are little boxes that people hide with things in them. You have to use a GPS to find its coordinates in order to locate the geocache. So it is kind of like hunting for a treasure, but really there are just little gidgets or toys in the geocaches and a log book to sign that you found it. You can also exchange things in the geocache, take one thing but leave something else for someone else to find.

So...night caching, is doing the same thing but at night, in the dark. We prefer to take the 4-wheelers and go to the mountains to do our geocaching. So last night, we loaded up the 4-wheelers and headed off to find our treasures. This was the first time we had done the night caches. You have to have good flashlights, and good shoes. So you find the first coordinate, then you shine your flashlight all around in the trees until you see a reflector on a tree. The darker it is the better to see the reflectors. Then you hike over to the tree to get a better look at the reflector. The reflector is an arrow pointing a certain way to go. There will be either an arrow pointing left or right or an arrow pointing up means to keep going straight and an arrow pointing down means that the geocache is hidden right there. So it is kind of like a scavenger hunt. You end up hiking all over in the trees so it is wise to wear long sleeve shirts and pants. We had alot of fun doing this, however, on about our 8th one, we were half way down the hill in the thick of the trees when we hear this loud snap of branches, which usually means there is a large animal nearby. Us girls got alittle frieked out, but we continued on our hunt in the dark. On the 9th geocache, we were only on our second arrow, when Annie thought she saw the next arrow, but instead it turned out to be two eyes staring at us. By that point, us girls were REALLY frieked out! So we started hiking back up the mountain to the 4-wheelers. But guys will be guys, and they thought they needed to get a closer look. After making several noises to try and scare the animal away, it wasn't moving. They said it smelled of a dead carcas down there, so my guess was the animal was having its dinner and was not going to be moving anytime soon. So we decided to call it a night because it was getting late. We are going to have to go back and finish the last two another time, hopefully there won't be any big animals to scare us girls!!

Annalee and I finding the first cache of the night.

Colby and I finding a cache. If you notice on the tree above our heads, there is the reflector that shows us where to go.

Colby getting his gear ready.

Mo, Annalee, and Jody.