Last Saturday I spent the day checking out my caches. Hurricane Shirley had blown through town earlier in the week knocking down trees and power-lines  I wanted to make sure my caches were intact. Along the way I ran into two other geocachers who were checking them out. I decided to make one of my award-winning geocaching videos as part of the experience.

The first part of the video is the examination of one of the caches I placed on the Schuylkill River trail. No, I won’t tell you the name of the cache, that would make this all too easy. As you can see, it’s disguised as a rock and fits in with the background. In spite of my attempts at cameo, the cache has been found by anyone looking for it. My guess is “one of these things don’t look like the other” plays a factor in the discovery. The winds of Shirley didn’t do any damage to it.

Next we discover Evanspack finding a cache as I approach Ground Zero. The tree she’s climbing over wasn’t laying there when I placed it. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few of those trees down near GZ. It gives you some idea what a sustained 50 MPH wind can carry out. Again, the cache was undamaged, as she clearly shows.

I decided to take an interlude in my cache trail by filming the Schuykill River. The river was way high after the storm, but it can go higher. One of these days I’ll show some of the pictures I took a few years ago when incessant summer rains threatened to submerge the local borough  As I mention in the video, my town was underwater after Hurricane Agnes scored a direct hit on the mouth of the river in 1972. Agnes proceeded to do the demolition boogie all the way up to Reading.

Once again I met Evanspack as she found yet another one of my caches. I was a little concerned as one of the logs had reported it “soaked”. Although it had a some moisture inside, the cache wasn’t soaked in the least bit. I do wish someone would take the book I put in it.

Finally, I ran into Softbyte finding another one of my caches. He wasn’t using a GPS receiver, but managed to find it just from the hint and description on the Groundspeak entry. Softbyte is organizing a geocacher meet-up at a local eatery this Thursday and I’ll be reporting on the gathering.

I checked out most of the other ones and they are intact. I’m hoping all of them will survive the coming winter months.