by Markus
15. December 2009 08:35
Yesterday (2009-12-14) I decided to have a go at one of the recently released caches around home, armed with my iPhone, eTrex and a couple of flashlights I headed towards GC21ZCE.
After quite a distance at increasingly small and bad roads I finally reached the recommended parking, a light snowfall had begun. I prepped the lights, GPS and my clothing and went out of the car. It was still some 600m to the cache and the snowfall was slowly increasing but I was not going to let that stop me from logging the cache.
After a few hundred meters on a really small road the GPS pointed me straight into the woods, this is when it gets interesting. Looking for some sort of path to follow I went into the woods, of course I couldn't find a path so I just went straight in. The straight in approach was a bit risky since I ended up virtually in a swamp, managing to keep myself reasonably dry I was soon through this rough spot. When I reached the "target area" I soon realised that finding a micro in this place wasn't going to be easy so I tried looking for hints from the owner, of course being out of cellular coverage ment that I had to find higher ground to be able to download the hints (yes I should have saved them in the phone before I went in but hind sight is always 20/20...). When I finally got some cell phone coverage and subsequently got the hint it was pretty straight forward finding the cache.
Since I had seen a couple of foot steps I suspected I wouldn't get the much desired FTF and I was right, KEOLL beat me to this one by many hours it turned out, KEOLL logged it at 11.20 and I was there at about 18.00 (but he didn't log it online until I eventually came home). All I had to do now was to get back to the car, luckily I had set a waypoint where I left the road and ventured into the woods. However all the small swamps and small creeks made it a bit hard to reach the road again.
Back at the car I had to reverse out the 200m back to the slightly bigger road, this is when my iPhone (and my only turn by turn navigation unit) decided to tell me that the battery was at 20%. Knowing that the charger was in our other car I knew that I had a problem. When the battery on my iPhone is at 20% it usually means that shutdown is imminent so I decided to use it as little as possible (I still had 10-20Km to the real main road) so now it was a race against time, would I make it out to the main road before the battery went completely flat?
Well I did make it out to the main road, speeding through the woods on really small, twisty roads in complete darkness and heavy snowfall is quite interesting (not sure the car would agree here). This is what I did last night, what did you do?