Exercise

[John RobieMember]

I found a good way to get exercise while cacheing. Just don’t move your car between caches. I walked for one cache at .2 miles from the car. Not bad right? Well the next one was .5 from that and just up a nice long beach. Well I became part mountain goat when the path stopped and the stones started. I am glad to say that my feet didn’t get wet. The problem then was I had .7 to go back to the car. Did you know that you had to go both ways? The farther you walk out the farther you have to walk back. 😛 Well I guess I will drop that extra weight that I want yet.

[OpossumMember]

We kind of decided against doing this, for the reason you stated. Start off heading out for 0.2 miles, find the cache, do a “find nearest” on the GPS and plan to jog 0.3 miles to the next one, but then find there’s a swamp you need to go around, so it winds up being 0.7 miles. You could head back, but 0.5 miles away is another one, and everyone hates car time. So, 0.65 miles later you decide to find “just one more,” and it kind of heads you back in the direction you came from anyway, so you go get it. Now you’re 4 miles away from the truck thanks to that last one being a multi, which you didn’t notice because the GPS just had a square dot for a waypoint, which would be no big deal if you wouldn’t have put on all that additional mileage ->looking<- for each hide, a storm is rolling in making it really humid and you're sweating like a pig, and it got dark out as you logged that last waypoint.

So, do you:

A.) Go back the way you came, which will take a long time but is safe because you know the terrain and can do a track-back on the GPS.

B.) Try to head right for the truck and not get rained on.

C.) Look at the clouds, predict they won’t drop buckets on you, and use the Mag-Lite you’ve recently added to your cache supplies to hunt that next cache at 0.3 miles?

[skarolekMember]

quote:

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Originally posted by John Robie:
I found a good way to get exercise while cacheing. Just don’t move your car between caches.

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A few weeks ago I was hiking at “Wallace Falls State Park” near Seattle, WA on the recommendation of a friend. There are 4 or 5 caches in the park but due to printing errors, I only had enough information to hunt two and one had been muggled based on information from the owner in response to my DNF.

Anyway, There were multiple trails in the park and I decided to do basically a loop…

The first 2ish miles were on a continually uphill railgrade from a long-vanished logging railroad, complete with some railway switchbacks. At the end of the line, there was a quarter mile or so nearly vertical drop to another trail – the “Woody Trail”. From here I had a choice, go left and hike about 2.25 miles up a mountain to view several falls (one cache I was hunting was at the middle falls). Then 2.25 miles back down to the junction and another 1.5 miles out to the trailhead, with a quarter mile detour to hunt the muggled cache .5 miles from the car.

I left my car in the lot the whole time. The next morning I was really really glad that all I had to do was take a shower and get on the plane home… I did not enjoy walking through SEA-TAC. I did very much enjoy the accomplishment of hiking 8 miles through some strenuous mountain terrain and seeing four beautiful waterfalls, one over 260 feet!

Hang in there and leave your car behind more often!

Steve K

[Author]

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