A not-so-fun geocache find

After some searching on geocaching.com yesterday, I found there were a bunch of geocaches in Brunswick. We had been talking about seeing how many geocaches we could find in an afternoon so I downloaded a bunch of coordinates in that area to find out.

The first geocache we chose to find turned out to be -- well not being able to offer more colorful language I'll say -- not fun.

The directions to park for this geocache said, "woodsy trail near parking lot" which we assumed was on Pleasant Hill Road based on our GPS map. We found a turn-off on the road that indicated the cache was 1/2 mile from that location. We thought we were in the correct place because we saw a trail leading into the woods.

The GPS pointed us to a trail that quickly turned into a bush-wack. That's not so unusual for geocaching but this bushwhacking went on and on and on.

Not a good time.

But we stuck with it because we were only a few tenths of a mile from the cache.

We climbed up hills. We slid down hills.

We ducked under trees. We jumped over trees.

We jumped over the winding stream; leaped over wider parts of the stream. And when we were lucky, walked over fallen logs across other parts.

Of course we could have given up the search. But by the time we realized that trying to find this cache was a mistake, we were already in the thick of the woods and closer to the cache based on our GPS reading than we were to the car.

We finally picked up a small trail again and ended up finding the geocache.

We took a snack break and by a unanimous vote, decided we were NOT going back the way we came.

We followed a small trail with sink holes and erosion (which we still thought better than the way we had come but hardly ideal) from the geocache to an open field and hiked along the edge of the woods for quite a while. We eventually picked up another trail that lead us back to the car.

We have never run across a geocache like this before. I'm careful to choose caches listed with 1, 2 or 3 stars (1 easiest - 5 hardest) for both terrain and difficulty. This cache rating was rated 3 stars for difficulty and 2 stars for terrain.

I think that was misleading.

But, if I had read all the "reviews" for the cache I would have realized that the name of the cache contained a clue as to where to park ("Dragons" was part of the cache's name which apparently is Brunswick High School's mascot, something a non-local wouldn't necessarily know). Other geocachers who knew this parked behind the school and took a trail that lead directly to the cache.

My mistake.

G. summed it up best, "That was the worst hike EVER!"

After a short respite, we did continue on to find two other caches that afternoon. They were both really fun, clever finds but more on those later...