Geocaching February 2024

I started the month off planning to find a mystery/unknown cache every day, a goal for a challenge cache nearby. My first was OCCT #6: Cached in 1/2 of United States Challenge. I've actually cached in 26 states, so I was overqualified! The Odenton Cooperative Challenge Trail provided a lot of finds for this month.

Part of the OCCT trail

A house that still has Christmas decorations!

The second day I found Random Wiki Puzzle: Falcon Stakes, which was easy to solve and find in the field.

Then I found OCCT #10: Globetrotter Challenge, which requires the cacher to have a distance of at least 100,000 miles between all caches found. I guess the honeymoon in New Zealand and visiting Europe helped out a lot!

A part of the OCCT trail

Continuing with the alternating pattern, I found Random Wiki Puzzle: Kuroda Seiki, again in Odenton. I found it on a Sunday afternoon at a dead end next to a busy intersection with no sidewalks. Amazingly enough, a muggle came walking by, forcing me to wait a bit before I returned the cache to its hiding place.

Filling one of my last empty days on the calendar, I found OCCT #27: Traveler Apprentice 3 Country Challenge, Strays Series 1: Cats Cat Name: Ziggy, and the Monday morning coffee meetup, in reverse order. The cat was very cute.

Ziggy

To switch things up, I found a challenge not on the OCCT. ZIP Code Region Challenge requires a cacher to have finds in all of the ten major ZIP Code zones in the United States. We've traveled enough to qualify!

On a day I didn't need a mystery cache, I found a multi-cache called Dorsey Cemetery. After finding how old someone was when they died, I was able to find the final cache. Unfortunately, the final cache was out in the open and had a block of ice inside...a pyramid-shaped block of ice! I was unable to sign the log but made the report to the owner.

Dorsey Cemetery

Open Cache

A hard log to sign

Afterward, to fill in my year calendar of traditional caches, I found Mad City Cache, which is near an independent coffee shop not too far from the Dorsey Cemetery.

My mystery cache run continued with Whirling Wonder - A Pi Day Problem. The puzzle was about helicopter blades on Mars (there's an atypical subject) which I had solved last month, thanks to help from the internet and a calculator. The find was not too hard and was near the observatory at Alpha Ridge Park.

A small observatory

Also nearby and also by a coffee shop was Cinnamon Cache, a traditional I needed for, you guessed it, filling in my traditional calendar. The cache location was a little creepy thanks to a skull (non-human) that was right next to the cache.

Yikes!

The next day I found another Random Wiki Puzzle: Doug Baldwin (Ice Hockey) to keep my calendar going. Then I found another Random Wiki Puzzle: 2016 Wheelchair Doubles Master, another Odenton find. I also found the nearby Feel the Power, a traditional cache to fill another day.

Powerful path

I took most of the family to Annapolis for ice cream and a cache, the CAM 2023-King William's School (St. John's College) mystery cache. We wandered around the campus gathering information and made the find in an extra-special hiding spot.

Gathering information

My reward

I went back to alternating Random Wiki Puzzles and OCCT caches with RWP: Oscar Jacobson, OCCT#28: Traveler Intermediate 10 Country Challenge, and RWP: Sheridan Snyder.

Hidden benches in back of a building

Beaver dam along the OCCT

Mixing things up, I found Gots me a knew souveneer (sp?!?) and HC Soccer Series: Blandair Park (which avenged an earlier DNF!). The soccer cache was near some soccer fields but I went on a snowy morning and there were no players even though it was a Saturday!

Unused fields

I am not the only one crazy enough to wander through the park

The next day my youngest had a birthday party in Eldersburg, Maryland, which was new territory in my geocaching adventures. I found nine caches in two hours, it would have been eleven if I hadn't had two DNFs. All We Wanna Do Is Eat Your Brains (!), HTML King 2, Celebrate 100 TIE Events (that's Tuesdays In Eldersburg), Power of Caching, 10 Eats (with a jammed container), Standard typical ordinary parking lot cache, Time to Play IV & Read (at the local library), Frustrating (which was not), and Heat Streak #1 (I will have to do more of this series next time I'm in the area). 

Jammed container

View from the cache to the library

Part of a DNF

I continued my mystery month with Sudoku Series #3 which was fun to solve and to find. The next day I discovered HC Soccer Series - Troy Hill Park and Bonny&Read which had a tight log that needed tweezers for extraction.

Another pair of non-traditional finds were Shark Attack! and HHHC: Waverly Tenant Farm Ruins. The later is the remains of a house behind some condos, an amazing discovery in suburban Maryland. 

Tenant house in ruins

Waverly Mansion still in good shape

This was not a boating accident!

MD Wells Run Restoration Project Earthcache is in College Park, Maryland, near the main campus of the University of Maryland. Wells Run doesn't look that great, maybe since it's February, but the water is good enough for ducks! Nearby, I also found Little Walks, and Talks about University Park which is also on Wells Run.

Not sure I would swim in that water...

I went back to Gorman Park for more of the Alpha Redux series, finding Redux-Y and Redux-W on the same day that I found the mystery cache Gilford Park Knapsack Problem. The view from the final part of the mystery cache was great. I finished of Redux-X and Redux-Z the next day.

Nice trail markers

View from Guilford Knapsack finale

Later, I went back to College Park to find a mystery called Bridge Budget Buster and a traditional called My Black History Cache... (placed in honor of Black History Month).

A path by caches

I found another OCCT cache, #8 Virtual Find Challenge, which only requires one virtual cache to qualify. I achieved that long ago. The next day I logged #11--Unknown/Mystery Challenge Novice 100 for another mystery and Cenosillicaphobia #3 for a traditional on the bigger calendar. Cenosillicaphobia is the fear of an empty glass, so naturally there's a brewery nearby.

I don't think I've tried any of their brews

Since this year is leap year, I was planning on doing a variety of caches on the 29th. Geocachers consider it a bit of a high holy day, since often challenges are based on calendar days and this day is only once every four years. I went to a morning kick-off event that had a raffle (I won a travel bug tag). Then I headed off on my own to Masonville Cove by Baltimore harbor, which has an earthcache and a traditional cache by the water. Then I headed south to BWI which has a virtual cache that requires a photo by the airport with something that identifies it. I chose the Thomas Dixon viewing park which has a nice sign and little traffic to deal with (and no tricky parking). Then I drove to the Odenton Library for a CITO event, which is Cache-in, Trash-Out. We picked up garbage in the parking lot and around the perimeter of the library. The woods contain an older mystery cache that requires a hundred-day caching streak. The container was gone (six people looked for it while they gathered trash). One of the cachers knows the owner and said it would be alright to make a replacement cache. I took credit since I made the hundred-day streak back in the summer and fall. Then I found a multicache at a church nearby the library, teaming up with another cacher who had come from the CITO event. I struck out on my own to find a Wherigo cache that was solvable from home (usually a cacher needs to be out in the field to get the solution). The same street has one of the Adventure Labs I've been working on, so I found that as well. My tenth and final cache was a letterbox in White Marsh Park (but not one of the Simpsons ones). 

At the meetup

Soon to be in the field, once I attach it to something

Vernal pool at Masonville Cove

Trash collector at Masonville Cove

Eagle nests, also at Masonville Cove

Credit for the airport virtual

CITO success

Cool house between the library and the church

Adventure lab location

Old-school caching for the letterbox!

I end the month with a full calendar and 1093 caches in total.

No white boxes!

My new project is to find a traditional cache on every day of the year. Currently, I need about twenty or thirty spread out over the next nine months (January and December are already covered!). It won't be too hard, I hope!