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/