Chewacla State Park, Auburn, AL (GC2NPKR) 4/9/11

With our work schedule, we haven’t been able to attend an event on a Saturday in a long time, but fortunately, we had this weekend free! We have wanted to get to the state park and check it out, so here was our perfect opportunity to drive down.

A few of the local cachers were holding two events at Chewacla State Park in Auburn, AL. The first one is a CITO, which you Cache In and Trash Out.  Basically, you are picking up trash while geocaching. It’s a great way to help the park and add smilies to your game. The second event is a Meet & Greet lunch.  Here is our chance to meet some of the cachers who we have come to admire for the creative cache hides!

We get everything ready the night before because we will have to leave early to be at the CITO in Auburn by 9:00 A.M. Our plan works out perfectly as we are packed and pulling the Jeep out of the driveway at 5:50 A.M.

We arrive in good time and find people already gathered at the Pavilion to start the CITO event.  We sign in and grab some gloves and trash bags.  Off we go!  We’re picking up trash as we are making our way to one of the many cache hides in the park.  We get to GZ (ground zero) and start looking.  It’s already quite warm for an early April day in Auburn.  It doesn’t take long for us to be perspiring profusely!  But as you know, Southern women don’t sweat, we glow!  The tree canopy is wrecking havoc on our GPS and the coordinates keep bouncing.  We have expanded our search and still come up with nothing.  Finally, Jim goes back to our original search and finds the cache hiding where we thought it should be.  This search took entirely too long, but glad we have it under our belt! 



CaverScott, Tazdevil and OCP



Back to walking the park and cleaning as we go.  We come up on our good caching friends, CaverScott and Tazdevil.  We stop to have a little chat and rest for a minute.  This is also a good opportunity to take a couple of pictures of the area. The park is truly a beautiful piece of property!

We see the area we are in has already been cleaned, so we decide to head back to the pavilion for some rest and water!  Unfortunately, the way back includes the steepest climb I have ever encountered without ropes and harnesses!  I’m not sure if we are on a trail or rain gully coming down the mountain, but up we slowly go! Jim keeps urging me to take my time and watch my footing; a fall here would definitely result in some broken bones for sure! As we finally reach the crest, we see we are right at the pavilion! Hallelujah brother!!!  Water, water!!  We need water!  We go straight for the Jeep and our cooler of water.  As we are drinking our fill, our area geocaching reviewer, mtn-man aka Greg Lampton makes a surprise visit to the event.  We have conversed through geocaching for the past 3 years and this was the first time to meet him.  It was so nice to meet the man who publishes our caches!



Blewlew and LCP



Lunch was delicious, the company fun and the door prizes awesome! I won a great little water tight container for your cell phone. Yes, I can see that becoming a cache container down the road! The big surprise was our hosts Woodnutt and SWSEC had hidden 53 more geocaches in the park and mtn-man was publishing as he finished lunch!  Isn’t modern technology great?!

We have the paper version of the caches, but Jim manages to get all the caches downloaded into his Oregon quickly.  We take off in search of more caches!  The race is on and we run by the Jeep to grab a water and head down a trail in our search.  We quickly find we are second behind the young couple we ate lunch with and they are on bicycles!  Oh, no fair!  Why didn’t we think of taking our bikes?! Oh well.  We decide to slow down our hunt and leisurely walk the park. 

The route we have chosen now takes us to another part of the park and we seem to be the only ones around.  We have a cache plugged in and start our search. Jim looks in the most obvious spot, but I find the cache just beyond about a foot.  It’s a big rabbit!  How cute since the cache name was Thumper! We love it!  Plus a big bonus here was we are the first to find!  Wahoo!  That puts a little spark in our step, for sure! 

The next cache we find is just as great!  Not only are we the “FTF” but another creative cache hide.  This cache was called the Legends of the Guardian (GC2QKXY) and is our favorite find so far!

We continue on finding virgin logs in the next 5 caches.  There were a couple we just could not find!  One was so sneaky, it had a decoy container, which we found, but never did find the official geocache.  Regardless of the DNFs or the FTFs, we were enjoying our day in an Alabama State Park.  We will definitely come back to enjoy the beauty and find more geocaches!

http://www.chewacla.net/

Going to Never, Never Land (GC1BPAP) Leeds, AL 11/9/08

11/2/08 - We saw this cache publish and realized no one was claiming the “First to Find” glory. We reluctantly wait for the weekend to drive out and have a look around.  Little did we realize what a rough drive in and as the cache owners states...a 4 wheel drive vehicle is definitely not a must, but could save you from a long trek. We maneuver the Jeep as best we could and were forced to park about .12 miles from the cache site due to the fact that we just recently replaced the soft top and didn't want to scratch the tinted windows...things got tight! After finally arriving and searching, we thought we had the find, but it ended up being a decoy and not the prize. Great area and we will be back to make the find soon.

11/9/08 - Here we go again on our second adventure with this cache. We called up ScooterBill to see if he wanted to attempt this cache with us and he was game! We planned to meet up at the service road entrance. We arrived first and while waiting, Leeds finest drive by and decided to have a little chat with us. We explain geocaching and he acts a little bit like he knows what we are talking about. He wants to know the coordinates to the cache and Jim shows him the GPS. He seems satisfied and said, "Have a nice day and I hope you find it." ScooterBill shows up just minutes after the police left. We both drive to the overpass bridge and we decide to take the Jeep in. We bushwhack a little section of the path that kept us from going in last time. Now, we are able to take the Jeep all the way to the cache site. Mimi makes the find and it's not long when we have the prize in hand. We share the FTF honors with SB. After this business is taken care of, we explore the area more thoroughly. Again, amazed at the beauty and the old bridge supports that still exists. We all take a few photos and leave. We'll come back and explore more of the side roads here.

6/13/09 – This awesome place keeps drawing up back here.  We decided to share this with some of our geocaching friends, so we held an event and made another trek in. The weather decided to have a little fun with us as well and rained heavily the night before and kept up a misting rain most of the day, which makes driving a bit more treacherous.

We have two Jeeps with us today as Beep~Beep aka Ray, has a monster Jeep and CaverScott with him and we take oldboyhiker in with us.  We lead the way down the slick, and even more rutted than before, path to the river. We soon get to a puddle, Jim doesn’t want to risk getting our Jeep stuck in, so we let Ray and the monster Jeep go ahead and lead the way to the water.