Geocaching December 2024

My geocaching month started with Name That Flag!, a mystery cache by a ball field. I tried to find it on a weekend in November but kids were playing on the field. There was no way to be stealthy then. A weekday made the find much easier.

I am working on finding more mystery caches, so I found the Series of Unfortunate Events-themed cache An Unfortunate Location, which was randomly at the side of the road. I also avenged a DNF at I wanna be the very cache, a Pokemon-themed mystery. 

Pokemon is somewhere here

I started working on the Warriors and Brothers in Arms Trail in Bowie, with a lot of mystery caches based on military history and the men and women who served our country. My first was POW, then I found Battle of the Bulge, which was my 1600th cache.

Cache 1600!

Nearby is Horselover Bridge with a horse head on it.

A hard selfie to snap

I had some time to kill while my youngest was doing his concert dress rehearsal so I found Glory Days, Leaf Me Alone!, Life Among the Dead (a cemetery cache), Milestone #1 A Book at the Library (by a library), and another in the Cluedo series MD Cluedo 4 of 10. This series is going slowly--I've only found three of them and don't have the notes of which clues were in the first one I found.

This is better camouflage in the spring and summer

The graveyard

I placed a new cache, You Shall Not Pass #5, while I was doing a maintenance check on an earlier cache. The new cache was found within hours of being published.

After another Monday morning meet-up, I found Define Definite Definitions #1, a puzzle that was not too hard. The next day was very foggy but I still came up with Bowie - 100 Souvenir Challenge. The Covid-19 "Mini-Jasmer" Challenge requires cachers to have found twelve caches that were published in the twelve months of 2020, the year of Covid. I qualified and made the find. A regular Jasmer challenge is to find caches hidden in every month since the beginning of geocaching, not an easy accomplishment.

Back on the Brothers in Arms Trail, I found Specialist James T. Davis and Robert's Ridge. I DNFed the ridge the week before and, after consulting with the cache owner, I put up a replacement cache. Nearby I discovered Wooden You Know It, a regular cache.

I found my 1000th traditional cache with the untraditionally named Gur dhvpx Trb-Whfgvpr Ntrag whzcf bire 13 ynml qbt. With that milestone completed, I went for OCCT #14 A Mere 1000 Traditional Challenge cache. 

GZ for the challenge

After another Monday morning meet-up, I went for Park n Ride n Cache #1 in the outskirts of Annapolis. Also in the neighborhood were two Random Wiki Puzzle hides: Land and Titles Court of Samoa and Torres del Paine National Park. 

One of the random GZs

I went back to the WB&A Trail to find Fix Bayonets! on a hillside. The next day I got The One That Got Away in Annapolis. The day after I avenged a DNF at The Mall in Columbia's Hook, Line, and Sinker. It was one of those finds where I thought, "How did I not find this last time?"

HLaS

MY LITTLE GIRL is a tribute to a cacher's daughter who got married earlier in the month, so it's fun to find a new cache. I was the fourth to sign the log. The next day, my wife solved the mystery cache Welcome to Koreatown, an Ellicott City cache in an area with a lot of Korean stores and restaurants. The next day, The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers - SSTTITD #4 was an easy find on a failed outing to get donuts. 

Christmas Eve I went to a nearby park that was the beneficiary of some new cache hides thanks to the 2024 Maryland Geocaching Society Holiday Party. The party is always on a Saturday in December; I always have kids' events on Saturdays in December, so I have never made it. Maybe some year? The park has mystery cache Toys of the Season and two traditionals--Things You Find in the Woods (a burial site for the Owens family that used to live on the land) and Unbreakable , If you Gno, you Gno (odd spacing and spelling included).

Some snow for Christmas Eve

Owens family resting place

Christmas Day I didn't go caching but I found five on the day after up in Sykesville during a run to the landfill. Troop 719, Trail in the Woods, and Parched are on the Linear Trail that runs through a neighborhood. I also found the mystery cache A Few of Our Favourite Things (British spelling in original) and The Guardian. It was a fun set of finds.

Library on the trail

A house by the trail with awesome decorations

The next day I found Non-Traditional One Calendar Month Challenge, a mystery where the finder needs to have found a non-traditional on every day of one month. I had done this last February, so I was good to sign. Another easy mystery was A Butterfly Whispers in the Wind... which was a solve-at-home cache about chaos theory.

On December 30 I found Quarry Place Puzzler: One Fine Day and The Answer is Always C, both mysteries I solved at home. The quarry also has a traditional named Quarry Place Throwdown #6, which is part of a series? I don't see any others listed.

The quarry

View from the other side with sunshine on water

The quarry does have rocky bits

The final day of December we traveled just north of Baltimore for a Christmas present. While my son was on his excursion, I found a bunch of caches, including It's a Mother Beautiful Bridge, Amped Up, No Need to Forze It, and baltimore crossroads. I also found the remains of Sharp Street UMC, a virtual that made me take a picture. After my son was done, we went to visit Community College of Baltimore County Essex for a bunch of caches, mostly along a fitness trail. Contained was the trickiest one; the others (Quid est?, Fitness Trail - Trunk, and Fitness Trail - Four) were simple finds for experienced cachers. 

Me and the UMC

On the college fitness trail

I end the year with 1650 caches total and 629 for 2024, so more than a third of my caching was done in the last year! December 2024 had 55 of those caches. Can I keep up this momentum in the new year?