Dutch Clog Cache (or "How I prove to America that I am a moron")
Saturday, Jun 30, 2001
I was very excited about today's cache trip. I had the good fortune of being contacted by Laura Bly of USAToday, who wanted to do a story on geocaching as a fun family activity. She was flying out from Washington DC to join our family on a hunt this morning. We were also going to meet up with Ann Ryan, who would photograph the adventure.
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I picked Dutch Clog for this hunt. Laura requested that we try a new one so she could get the whole experience rather than going back to one we had previously found. This location seemed a good candidate, it was fairly close by, many people had found it and it was described as a pretty area with horse trails and deer.
I had borrowed a second GPS unit from a friend, so we could compare the performance of his Magellan 315 against our Garmin EMap. Laura also had the Geode, a plugin GPS unit for her Handspring Visor. (It doesn't matter how many GPS tools you bring along with you though, you still need to enter the correct information. More on this later.)
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It was hot! The trail varied from open areas where the sun mercilessly beat down on us to cool, comfortable shaded areas. Ten minutes into the hike, Samantha, as usual, announced that it was too much for her and that she was tired. We took frequent beaks for water and snacks and I carried her on my shoulders at times. We passed several riders on horseback. Mac, the Geocaching Wonderdog,
got very upset whenever he saw the horses and barked and lunged at them. We restrained him, got past the horses without getting kicked in the head and continued on.
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At one point, a beautiful white tailed deer bounded out of the woods onto the path in front of us. It took no notice of us. Mac behaved here, so we got a nice look as it grazed around a bit and them ran off.
We finally reached a point that lined up with the N-S coordinates. Zach and I were showing Laura how you could now attempt to just line up the E-W coordinate to find the cache spot. For her story, Laura was interested wanted to better understand the accuracy of the devices. I told her that a 50' radius is common. I explained to her how the values for thousandths of a minute a latitude or longitude equate to just a few feet in either direction. We experimented a bit watching the numbers change as we moved back and forth. We went off the path to the east into some thick, thorny undergrowth. Something seemed wrong, however, as one of the clues on the cache page from the geocaching.com indicated that the cache ought to be just 200' off the nearest trail. "No problem", I announced to everyone, "The trail probably just curves around so if we keep following it, we can just approach the cache site from the east rather than from the west."
Dina was skeptical, but I convinced her to move on. Samantha was really tired. Zach didn't like the heat and the flies. This wasn't turning out like the nice family outing with USAToday like I had envisioned.
We kept going another 1/2 mile south, as luck would have it, the path did loop back around to where I hoped it would. So we went east a bit and than 1/2 mile north again and tried an approach from the east. Dina, Samantha and Mac were done. They decided to sit it out while Laura, Ann, Zach & I looked for the cache. We tromped through more thorny brambles and poison ivy. Zach yelled out a lot as he got stick with thorns. We arrived at a spot that looked promising and that the GPS units said was the spot matching the coordinates I had typed in (Note the distinction between the phrase "the correct coordinates" and the more devastating phrase "the coordinates I had typed in"...)
Guess what? We didn't find the cache. We looked all over the place (the wrong place...) and had no luck. It seemed like we were in the right place. There were indications that people had been at this spot and it was off the main trail. We found an oyster shell on the ground. It seemed strange and out of place there and we assumed that it might have been a cache goodie. Perhaps someone not playing the game had found and abscounded with the cache container. Maybe a clever animal had spirited it away.
Dejected, we gave up the hunt. Given that we had walked about 4 miles in searing heat, the kids were not up to walking back. I suggested that I would go back, get the van and then take Ann and Laura back to their cars. We went back a bit to a spot where the trail opened near a road and I started walking. and walking. and walking. and YES to add insult to injury, I did, in fact, walk in the WRONG DIRECTION... Sigh. I had the distinct pleasure of stopping a passing police officer and saying "uh sir, I was out in the woods with my family playing a game that uses these GPS units to point you with an unbelievable degree of accuracy to a given spot on Earth and, uh, I, uh, am lost. Can I please have a ride back to my car?". He did, and I got everybody and went back home to sulk.
Oh well, if you can't laugh at yourself...
So what happened? What did I do wrong? Basically, the coordinates I was working from all day in the GPS units, despite the fact that I had the printed sheet from geocaching.com with me, had the N-S information wrong.
The location for this particular cache had a trailing zero in the coordinates.
On geocaching.com, this was displayed as
N 42° 2.54 W 088° 12.329
I read this as
N 42° 2.054 W 088° 12.329 (the 2.054 part is the error)
instead of
N 42° 2.540 W 088° 12.329 (should have been 2.540)
Remember when Laura asked how far 1/1000 of a minute was? That is only a few feet difference, however the difference between 2.540 and 2.054 was about 8/10 of a mile!
I felt really bad about this when I discovered my mistake, because it caused us to walk much further in very hot weather and, of course, we ended up in the wrong place and didn't find the cache. I know Samantha and Zach were pretty wiped out afterwards.
The story will run in USAToday on Friday, July 26, 2001, online as well as in print.
Sunday, July 15, 2001 - There is an epilogue!
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