The Fungus Geoevent

Geocacher's really don't need much of an excuse to get together, so when an event was set up to honor the lowly mushroom for national mushroom month, that sounded like a great idea to us!

We all met together at Trout Creek Wilderness Park, which is a great place to hang out, look for caches and to do some serious canoeing.

The owner of this canoe offered to let us borrow their fine craft which would have been a nice idea, were we not on our way to hunt some of the new geocaches that were placed in the area.

The lack of wind made for some great water photos (no ripples) but man, it was hot and stifling with all of the humidity hanging in the air.

You never know where a geocache might be hidden. I mean, you could literally be sitting on one, and Karen found this one pretty quickly.

Yeah, I really liked the scenery today...

At one point, we had to cross this flood control dam. As we made our way across it, Karen and I stopped and reminsced about the days we used to jump off of these structures into the water below without a care about what was in the water or how deep it was. Oh yeah, the memories...

Here is the waterway the dam is controlling. The water level is so low that the gates were locked in the upright position.

Well, time to make a little progress down the road. I mean, come on, even the tortoises are moving faster than we are!

After we found a nearby cache, my tree-hugger cousin just had to try out this natural made tree-saddle for a bit.

At one point during our hunt, Karen came face-to-berry with this vine across the path and we just happened to catch her in mid 'eye-cross'.

I really like our jaunts out in the woods. You never know what kind of photo opportunities may present themselves as we hunt for those elusive containers.

For example, even the mundane caterpillar can catch our eye.

Well, this geocache could only be located after figuring out the puzzle that was on the geocache's webpage first. It's always a great thing to discover the container is really where you 'calculated' it to be.

Afterwards, Karen located one of our contest GeoGems in a cache and moved it to another container. She's found and moved three of the ten now. Pretty soon, she'll be picking up one of our gemstone trophys!

Ah, the very thing that was the reason to have a geocaching event for. We found this fine example on the path while we were hunting for a geocache.

Well, it was a bunch of fun, and we found 8 geocacaches that were new to us, while Karen found 12 of them (some were ones we had found before, so we handed her the GPS and let her fend for herself). All in all, it was a great time had by everybody.