DUCK TAPE IN THE MORNING & FAILURE AT DUSK

It wasn't exactly a dark and stormy night, but it was definitely a dark and gloomy day. You know, spitting snow and rain, much colder than advertised (darn you National Weather Service!!)--think 30* and not 40--and heavy cloud cover. What else can a dedicated geocacher or two do...but get out and go searching!!

Our day would take us from Mabscott to Sophia and later Lake Stephens by way of such scenic spots as Lillybrook, Odd, New and of course Coal City (again). I have to say here and now, all roads do not lead to Rome, at least in Raleigh Co WV. In Raleigh Co. they all seem to lead to Coal City. A few weeks ago I had never even heard of Coal City, and my life seemed to be progressing well. During the last three Geocaching trips, BatikFreak10 (BF10) and I have been in or through Coal City at least once during each and every trip. Who knew Coal City would occupy what seems to be a pivotal point in the geocaching life of Raleigh County.

We stopped off in Mabscott to pick up a Travel Bug (TB)--a little object a geocacher can send out to travel the world and visit specific spots if desired--to move it to another location. I had placed my TB in a nice cache last fall and it had never moved elsewhere. I was disappointed to find that all TB's in the cache (three were listed) had been--more or less--swiped, stolen, purloined, heisted. Someone had been taking the TB's and...who knows what. I don't even want to think about it. Oh well, it happens. Not to be dissuaded, we continued on with our day.

Pictures and captions follow:

Out to Little Beaver State Park to finish up the three caches located there. Little Beaver is a nice swimming/picnicking park. Lots of woods in which to hide caches too. We had found one of the three listed for the park last trip and had run out of time to do more, so back we went.

BatikFreak10 shows off one of the hides. We are well off the hiking trails so almost no chance of this being seem by muggles (those uninitiated into the geocaching world). Believe it or not, a hide like this is hard to find. We all tend to look at the ground, under rocks and such, for caches. No one ever thinks to look up. Thanks to BF10 for this one.

Up close you can see why this one is sort of unique. The container is not silvery metal as you might have thought, but a plastic container covered in the well known duct tape product. Even the strap handle is made of many layers of the sticky stuff. Fun.

We found the other cache listed for Little Beaver Park too. On to such places as New and even Odd.

We're just outside of Ghent WV, and stopped at a long abandoned road side park. Are you old enough to remember when there were many roadside parks throughout the country? They usually consisted of a picnic table or two, a water pump and if you were lucky the pit toilet wasn't too dirty and even contained some TP. Those parks are mostly gone now, but here we found a cache located in an abandoned fire pit and this plaque honoring the lady who helped found the WV roadside park system back in the day. The park is overgrown and mostly unidentifiable now. People are too busy to stop, cook a burger or two, and spend quiet time with the family.

Just outside the community of New (it's not a town but a gathering of homes--don't blink) and I'm digging in to a cache for the log. BF10's camera doesn't make good pics. I'm not that bald.

Why are you laughing?

Now this is what I call SWAG!!
And yes, it now has an honored spot in my small but growing swag collection.

I don't often pick up swag, but this one caught my eye and struck my fancy all at the same time. What you can't see here is the fact that the eye shakes and vibrates when the figure is moved a little. First class swag indeed!!

And so it went throughout the day. Drive, cache, eat, then repeat. 14 finds for 14 hides. And then we came to the end of the day and the end of the road...

Have you ever seen the movie "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"? It starred Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and was released in 1971. McCabe was a gambler and Mrs. Miller was a prostitute. At the end of the movie McCabe was killed by the bad guys. He died in the snow and gathering gloom of a very dark evening. No one was there to morn his passing. And that's pretty much what happened to BF10 and me.

We headed out to Lake Stephens Park for that last one of the day. We hiked a very short distance into the woods to find...nothing. We missed I guess, or looked in the wrong spot, or...who knows. We searched for nearly an hour, turning over every log, looking in every tree. It was darkening, snow and rain were falling. I tried to wipe the water off the screen of my GPS only to find it had frozen. We died in the snow and dark, with no one to morn our loss. We were probably more downcast than necessary, but we had died. 14 for 15 and we should have batted a thousand.

HIDING IN A SURREAL SOUNDSCAPE

This is really a story about sound, but that's for much later. First there's this that you need to understand:


Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

Thus read the opening sentences of "Don Quixote", by Miguel de Cervantes. Written in 1605 and considered by many who study such things to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote plays a part in all this. Bear with me a while as I tell my story.

I have been working the past few weeks on a cache located near the Beech Ridge Wind Energy Project, in western Greenbrier County and finally was ready to put the cache(s) in place and have the cache made active for other geocachers to find. This Wikipedia page will give some of the details about the wind energy project. It is not exactly correct in all respects but will give a little background about the project and wind energy farms in general.

Beech Ridge is about as remote as it is possible to get in Greenbrier Co., being a 15 mile drive from civilization (Rupert WV) to the ridge itself. I had wanted to make this cache a little more challenging than your typical guard rail cache and had decided upon a cache that would consist of three separate, but interconnected, hides. The seeker would have to find the first cache from the published documentation and would then need to find the second cache from coordinates found at the first location. He (she) would then find the GPS coordinates for the final (and main) cache at the second site. Only the final hide would contain a log book and the treasured swag (stuff we all get, remember?).

Yesterday was perfect for going to hide a cache. While it did not qualify as a dark and stormy night, it certainly was a dark and gloomy day. Just right for messing around in bushes and behind rocks hiding things. Everyone would be too busy finding their way through the gloom to notice or wonder about Joyce and me tramping through the fog.

Now we can begin.

I'm hiding the first stage here. The peanut butter jar works perfectly for this hide. The coordinates for the second cache are written on a piece of paper in the jar. Oh yes, there's a lot of junk paper in there too. The seeker will have to find the right scrap in order to be given the next set of coordinates.

Joyce gets to model the second stage hide, a simple water bottle. I used this container because recycling is a nice idea and the bottle will fit into where I have in mind to hide it. The coordinates are hidden within the container, believe it or not, although at first glance--and second glance too, come to that--the jar appears empty.

Finally we are at our destination, and the reason for including Don Quixotes opening lines becomes evident. Beech Ridge is a wind energy farm, a collection of 67 windmills all generating electricity. The name of my cache is "Don Quixotes Nightmare" in honor of the gentleman of La Mancha; he who tilted at windmills, thinking they were a race of giants--for wind turbines truly are a race of giants. And today I am unable to show you a standing wind turbine for the fog on Beech Ridge cut visibility to less than 150 feet, but I can show you some staggering details. I am standing near the base of one turbine blade. The blades are over a hundred (100 feet) in length each and each tower extends nearly 400 feet into the sky. These are truly a race of giants.

Joyce is standing inside the base of the blade. That's a manhole behind her. A person can climb inside the blade for quite some distance, for inspection I suppose.

A hundred or so feet from the picture above and Joyce is at the blade tip. The detail shot below shows the back side of the blade where Joyce is standing and the reason for this blade not to be in use. A lot of fiberglass, plastic foam and fiberglass matting have been injured. Are these blades reparable? I have no idea.

But as Arlo Guthrie says in that song about Alice's Restaurant, I didn't come here to talk about geocaches, or even wind generators. I came to talk about the sound. Let's wait for it to come around again on the guitar...here we go

The sound here is unimaginable. The blades turn slowly, they're too big to do otherwise. But even at what seems to be low speeds, they are traveling at a terrific rate due to the diameter of the circle they describe. The blade tips are usually traveling at nearly 100m.p.h.!! This day, when we could not see the towers, may have been perfect for being here for the sound. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. Some trick of the fog and wind I suppose.

The sound is not loud in and of itself, but is pervasive. You cannot seem to get away from it. Turn, look up, look out, look around, the sound is always...over there. Or up there. Or even more troubling...behind you. It seems to come from all around and overhead, all at the same time as the blades are turning. It is a low rumbling whoosh that sometimes seems to waver, I guess as the wind changes and eddies somewhat. It is as if some great prehistoric bird or other beast is circling and turning, always out of our sight, but with us well in its sight. It seems to mesmerize you into stillness, prey for who knows what.

Comfortable and mysterious at the same time. A wonderful experience.

NO ANSWERS, ONLY MORE QUESTIONS

This isn't a story about geocaching, although it appears here in my GC'ing blog. It isn't even a story about a successful hunt, if your only criterion for success is finding a specific answer or place, for we really only found more questions. This past Saturday BatikFrak10 and I met Waypoint Wayne to do what can only be called industrial archaeology along an abandoned CSX (formerly C&O) railway grade near the town of Fitzpatrick WV.

WaypointWayne (Wx2) is he of the wonderful "Phone a Friend" geocache. Scroll far down to refresh your memory of that outstanding cache. Go ahead, we'll wait here.

See. Worth the review wasn't it?

Wx2 seems to be interested in the industrial history of an area as much as seeing a place as a possibility for hiding "Tupperware in the Woods", and when we reported finding extensive concrete foundations near a cache he was watching, he contacted us (me I guess) about what those remains looked like and exactly where they were located.

WX2 was, and remains, interested in locating a site called "Spanglers Mill", both to find the industrial ruins and to find the town site itself. Spanglers Mill, the town, is listed on a 1913 USGS topo map of the Fitzpatrick/Crab Orchard area of WV. The problem is, where exactly was Spanglers Mill? No one seems to know any longer. According to the way I read (past tense) and continue to read (present tense) a C&O map that I own, Spanglers Mill (the mill itself) might be located near a certain C&O bridge. A problem arises here because that bridge is about two miles from the site that Wx2's map shows the location of Spanglers Mill Town/Mill.

We agreed to meet and do a physical hike into the area and see if we could find a definitive answer to our little puzzle. Follow along:

We're hiking along the tracks here, looking for... ? I guess we're looking for whatever we can see. Already we have found several areas of concrete foundations between the tracks and Piney Creek. I do know that what we have found is not a C&O water tower or signal bridge, those have easily identifiable patterns in their construction. These looked like a small building or two of some nature but were fairly far back from the tracks themselves.

What's this? We don;t know. Is it man made? Concrete? A foundation of some nature? We don't know are were unable to find out. It is across Piney Creek and the creek was nearly bank full, way too deep to even think about wading. Piney Creek is about 15-20 feet wide at this point--quite substantial.

One thing we did find out for certain, spring is not far away. Colts Foot, one of our earliest spring wild flowers, blooms along our path.

We're about a mile or so cross country from the town of Crab Orchard at this coal load out. A load out is the business end of a tipple where the coal is loaded into the hopper cars after cleaning and other processing at the tipple. We have been looking for the remains of what is locally described as a"dinky" track up to Crab Orchard in the early 20th century. The "dinky" brought coal down to the mainline RR for loading into hoppers and shipment to the outside world. The abandoned dirt road behind the load out might be the "dinky" track later converted into a primitive road. The road follows a water grade--always a good sign when looking for old RR grades. But again we don't know for certain. We are running out of time and will have to return another day to explore further. A "dinky" is a narrow gage railroad, usually primitive and somewhat crude.

Is this what success looks like? We don't know for sure, but across Piney Creek we can clearly see the remains of a very old road (not railroad) grade. WX2's topo shows a road descending to the town of Spanglers Mill. Have we found the road?

Here's another view of the road grade and some wonderful, and very old, stone work along the creek.




Here's what we don't know after our trip:
* If we have found the road leading to Spanglers Mill (which seems likely), then where is the town site? We saw no concrete foundations near this spot. Indeed, there's almost no place to perch a even a very small town nearby.
* How big was Spanglers Mlll (the actual mill)? Court records from a lawsuit involving the Spangler heirs mention only a small quantity of easily portable woolen milling equipment which would in turn indicate a very small operation. We have a photo which is captioned "Spanglers Blacksmith Shop". What if the caption is wrong and what we are seeing in the photo is actually Spanglers Woolen Mill?
* If the larger ruins BatikFreak10 and I found earlier where not Spanglers Mill, then what were those ruins, and why aren't they noted on my C&O map?
* Is the road grade we found actually the Spanglers Mill road?
* Did we find the "dinky" tracks?
* What about all those other foundations we found early in our hike? What were those?

One thing we do know, we had a nice day.
All photos courtesy of BatikFreak10.

14 CACHES & A GRAMMAR LESSON

Actually, I guess the title more accurately should be "13 Finds, One DNF (did not find) and a Grammar Lesson", but that seemed a little unwieldy. But that's the short and sweet truth of our GC'ing day on March 1. Yes, we (BatikFreak10--my sister Sally) and I are getting into spring geocaching mode.

Check things out:

Although not our first cache for the day, this is a shot of a well done cache and the well equipped geocachers tools:
* Pack full of swag to leave, swag to take home as souvenirs , pens and pencils, batteries, water, candy bars (very necessary)... You get the idea.
* Open geocache. This one was put in place by a church youth group and is the traditional ammo box.
* GPS device
* Camera to record finds, disappointments, odd scenery, odder people, yadda X 3
* Pathtags (blue bag) to leave. Pathtags are discussed elsewhere below (scroll down) and are trinkets to leave as a way of saying "I was here".

One of our few guardrail type caches for the day. Do you see it? It's the shiny inspection panel. The hider made several of these to scatter about. Quite effective a hide. When properly positioned you are almost afraid to touch the panel. It looks like part of the telephone installation.

BatikFrak10 shows off one of the better caches. This one was way up a hiking trail (water crossings required) and then hidden in a very rocky area to further complicate finding it. The cache owner left a disposable camera in the cache so you could leave him/her a memento photo of yourself. But this time the film was used up and we couldn't leave a photo behind. Nice hide.

This and the photo below show some of the trail to the cache shown above and one of the water crossings.

And now for the unfortunate grammar lesson. This is a trail marker that visitors to our area will see. Think about these questions:
* Is the Billy Goat gruff? * Does the Billy Goat own the gruff trail? * Does it say the Billy Goat is gruff? Groan.

Of course, the trail name is taken from the old childhood story "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". The goat(s) should not have this offending comma. Things like this can leave a bad impression as to the educational level of my home. In this case, the bad impression is justified. How sad. End of tirade.

No, there's no photo of our one DNF because we didn't find it. Of course.