First Cache

First Cache

Saturday 2/11/06

Got up early and had breakfast with almost a hundred other geocachers at Golden Corral. Some of the cachers I met were Greengenes and Los Xile who was on his one-thousandths cache. After breakfast we drove up to another cache that was atop a cliff like hill. We parked at the bottom of the cliff at a place called Hy Pointe then commenced our climb to the top where the McHarry Family Vault stood.

It was an extremely hard climb since it had just snowed and the dirt was wet. The ground was also covered in masses of fresh leaves which refused to be clung to for support. Most trees also were only covered in about two inches of soil, which caused quite a bit of problem. About a fourth of the climb up I began to slip and grabbed a tree for support. Luckily this tree was stable. As I took another step up my right shoe started slipping off my foot. I tried in vain to keep it on and it fell nearly half-way back down.

With only one shoe I couldn’t very well climb back down to get it so I sent my dad down to retrieve it for me. Climbing up the cliff with a hiking staff was hard enough, but climbing with the 7 foot climbing staff and a shoe was even harder. First he tried tossing it up to me but to no avail. As if I didn’t already know this, I am a horrible catcher. In the end he settled for handing it up to me on the end of the staff.

With my shoe back in place we continued up. As far as we could tell Greengenes had already made it up successfully, there was no sign of him anywhere. I looked up and could see that I still had a long way to go, but I was determined to make it to the top and find the cache. Looking back down, I was slightly consoled by the fact that I could no longer see the car or we had started, but I still wasn’t even half-way.

We lost many other things on the way to the top also, like two water bottles that were in my dads fanny-pack (or as he calls it, his ‘utility belt’). He also lost his cell phone on the way up and didn’t notice until we were nearly to the top.

Upon reaching the vault we found Greengenes waiting. We asked if he had already found the cache, but his reply was no. He told us that his GPS was pointing off the cliff and he had wanted to wait until someone else arrived before peering over. A wise choice considering the cache was no where near there. After setting him in the right direction my dad took me to the front of the vault and set me on his shoulders to read the inscription. As far as we could tell it read this:

F. McHarry’s Family Vault
Alexander McHarry
Of County Down near Grey’s Abbey, Ireland
Died Feb. 10th 1865 in the 85th year of his age.
He has gone the Sabbath greatest friend sh___ and friends when this you see. He lives no more the Sabbath to defend. Prepare that your last end, like his, may be. May his example e__y he_l incline then when you’re called to meet your friends. Keep the Sabbath holy and divine. O’er the Sabbath never end.

After I finished reading this another group of cachers came up the cliff and we took a group photo. Then we all started looking for the cache. I found it stuck in a niche in the side of the vault and covered in leaves and sticks. Inside were a lot of spiffy things. There was a hat, a deck of miniature playing cards, a CITO (Cache in, trash out) kit, a silver coin, and a lot of other stuff. I took a wooden box with a silver lid and left a coin.

It was a tad-bit disappointing that someone else made it up the cliff before me, especially since my dad was the one who put it up there in the first place (which earned him a push off the cliff from the other cachers)

Overall this cache was totally awesome, if you ignore the mud, leaves, dead animal skulls, and other things on the way up. The view from the top looks pretty nifty and there are quite a few comfy reading spots, if you wanted to take the time to climb up.

Hikaru