Late Saturday afternoon, after the Alan Lightman talk, Chris and I embarked on a geocaching expedition to be followed by beer and pizza at the Moose's Tooth. Definitely a jam packed, total fun day from end to end.
Chris had never been geocaching, but she definitely was already hip to its concept and was ready to give it a whirl. The first cache we did was the nefarious little cache, For All to See, that stymied me last week. And this time, I was sure I knew where it was.
But of course, I was wrong. However, the rookie Chris said, You know this little piece of equipment on the fuse box just bothers me. So, I grabbed it and sure enough - it was the cache!!!! Chris is a natural!!!!
Our second cache, Operation Blue Moon, was a complete and total blast. Blue Moon is designed to be done under cover of darkness. Which makes it impossible in the summer. However, on Saturday November 20, at 5:00 PM, it was pitch black - welcome to Alaska in the winter.
Usually a geocache is located at a set of coordinates and your mission is to make it to those coordinates and find the cache. However, Blue Moon takes a novel approach - the coordinates are simply the starting point - the quest doesn't truly get underway until you arrive at the coordinates.
We stumbled around a bit before landing on the coordinates. At that point, we tucked away our trusty GPS and commenced the real hunt. Using flashlights, we started looking for little splats of reflective tape tacked on to trees. After a bit of searching, we found the first one. It was very cool - a little 1/2 inch square of reflection beaming back at us from about 100 feet away. We zoomed through the snow to the tree and excitedly looked for the next piece of tape. We quickly found it and we were off and running.
Oh - and by the way - did I mention that we were in the deep woods and it was very dark and that this particular area is notorious for being very moosey.
Anyhoo, we bounced via reflective tape deeper and deeper into those dark moosey woods. After about 1/2 mile, numerous reflective trees and no moose (fortunately), we reached the cache location - a tree with two reflective patches instead of just one. And voila, there was the cache!!!
What a brilliantly fun hunt!
Of course, we won't mention that Chris and I got somewhat lost making our way back in the dark. We didn't mind getting lost. But what we did mind was not getting closer to beer and pizza. Fortunately, we made it back before we expired of thirst and starvation.
So, here are some pictures:
Here I am pointing to the first cache of the night. Yup, it's
that little gray piece of equipment. Faux equipment as it turns
out.
Here's Chris and the Blue Moon cache.
A reflective tree - actually the cache tree - note
the two reflective patches.
8:02:14 PM 
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