TEXAS CHALLENGE 2008

This year, I decided to try something I had not experienced - compete in the annual Texas Challenge, a competitive geocaching event hosted by the Texas Geocaching Association. The Challenge is a statewide event where cachers from the different geographicial regions come compete against each other in a half day race for points earned by finding geocaches and "tokens" that are hidden specifically for the event. The caches that are hidden vary in type and can consist of regular caches, puzzles, multi-caches, and activities. Teams also can earn extra points by being the First To Find on a geocache and picking up a specific token.
This year the Sixth Annual Texas Challenge was being hosted by the North Texas team at Lake Mineral Wells State Park. I am on this mission to camp at all the state parks in Texas, so that was part of the appeal to me. I also wanted to experience a competitive caching event and see if I liked it, and I wanted to make new friends and be a part of the action. I had heard other cachers talk about the Challenge and I was curious to see what it was all about.
I decided not to take off work for this event because I am trying to hang on to my vacation days, so that meant a late start for a long drive. My family had been going back and forth on logistics and who was going to go or not as well, and finally we decided it would just be the oldest son and I. I had everything packed the night before for a quick start, and we left about a half hour after I got home from work at five pm. The park was about a five hour drive from northwest Houston where I live, and the gates to the park were closed at 10 pm, so it was a scramble to get there in time, which meant no caching along the way. We did sneak one in because it happened to be in the parking lot of our favorite pit stop on the way to Dallas (Woody's Smokehouse).

My son had been away for Spring Break with his grandparents, so we talked the whole drive about his experiences on his trip, the latest movies he had seen, books we had read, ghosts, stories from his infancy and early years, and everything in between. It was great bonding time and I am really glad we had it. He fell asleep as we entered Dallas, though, and I was a little envious because I was exhausted by this point. I was trying to make it in the park "under the wire" and I made it fifteen minutes later than the target time, but the gate was still open.

We were sharing a campsite with our region (SEtx)'s Team Leader, TexasDreamweaver, who had met us at the lake spillway and led us to the campsite. He helped us pitch our tent in the darkness and then my son and I prepared for bed and cuddled together in our little tent as the coldness of the night crept in. Before he went to bed, he says, "You're the best, Mom. I'm having so much fun with you!"

That's worth every penny of gas we spent to have our adventure.

That first night was cold, and the way I had arranged our blankets was not working out for me so much. My son was quite warm in his army sleeping bag, but my sleeping bag was underneath us and the blankets I brought were too light to keep me comfortable. I don't think I slept much at all, and then the morning started to break and it was time to meet the team for breakfast and the morning pep talk.
We drove to the base camp and the SEtx team started to filter in. I was surprised to see so many faces. We had discussed the possibility of a small turnout and it looked like more than the 18 or so people I thought were going to participate. There were some cachers whose names I had seen in logs but had never met in person, some old friends, and some I had never heard of showing up. CherokeeCachers set up a light breakfast made possible through donations of muffins, fruit, cinnamon rolls, juice, and coffee. TexasDreamweaver gave us the latest information and strategy updates. Those who had not already picked up badges and lunch meal tickets from the dining hall went to do that. Then there was the wait for the starting gun.
Four laptops had been set up in our base camp awaiting the moment where the contest started and a zip drive was handed to our team leader that contained all our waypoints. Each of the laptops (I think we were using three of the four, really) was set up with a different downloading cable to accomodate the different types of GPS receivers. Since the downloading of waypoints was part of the contest time, the idea was to decrease this as much as possible. Our team had the computers primed and ready to go, but there was a little difficulty transferring the information to the other computers and getting it ready to download once the initial information transfer was complete. The first computer was up and running, and some of the groups in our team were able to get started with their hunt, but our group had to wait for a bit because the laptop hooked up to the serial cable that I needed for my Garmin was having issues reading the drive. There were some technical hiccups, I guess you could say.

By the time our group got up to our hunting area, a half hour had gone by in the 4.5 hour contest. The hunting area we had selected was the Cross Timbers trail, which is the second most rugged trail system in the park. The most difficult trail system in the park was called Penitentary Hollow, and the cachers that were sent there mentioned something about needing to be half-goat and hiking amongst rock climbers that day. Our trail system had its moments.

Since we were so far behind the other teams that hit the same hunting ground, we decided that we should change our strategy to maximize the use of our time. Instead of hunting the first caches we came to, we were going to hustle out to the far end of the trail system and then hunt on our way back.

As it turns out, even the groups that hit the area first had the same idea. I was reading the logs from the event and this was a common strategy. CenTx sent out the marathon runners on their team to run to the farthest waypoint, but they were behind a NTx team that had a leader experienced in these trails who had also led them at a run to the far north end of the trail system. We didn't stand a chance at the FTF tokens with our late start, these runners employing our same strategy, and the sheer number of competitors from NTx out on the trail. We probably ran into about four or five different groups of Ntx cachers, one or two groups of Centex cachers, and maybe a West Texas team (competing for their first year!), although I can't be sure.

Our little foursome were the only Setx group hunting this range, unless you count Stan from Muddy Buddies hunting with Fendmar for our team's "Evil Hide". Each team had one Evil Hide (a caching term for extremely hard, deviously camoed to the environment) hidden just for them worth 500 points. Stan and Fendmar rode with us up to the parking area and found one cache with us before we headed for the hills.

We took off at a fast hiking pace, just to the point to make conversation a little difficult. Tom, from team Greatbirds, pulled out his trekking poles and began eating up some miles. I was his caching partner for the day (we all hunting in pairs or groups for safety sake) and I was quickly walking next to him, or turning around to talk with GSGuru (Diane) and Nov64 (Patti). During the course of our hunt, we all had some pretty nice conversations one on one with each other and got to know each other better.

We had decided on our strategy of heading for the furthest caches first because we knew how difficult it was for geocachers to resist the pull of the arrow. When there is a cache "just 100 feet over there", the force is so strong that only a true caching Jedi would be able to resist. We were not that strong, or maybe we were just efficient, because we did stop at a couple along the way that would be inconvenient to get on the way out. One was a redirector for a multi. As we pulled up to GZ, we all fanned out and were searching different areas. As we searched, a Ntx team came up and walked right to it. They told pirate jokes as they wrote down the coords from the redirector and otherwise completely ignored us. It was so odd the way they walked right to it, and at another cache we saw them do the same thing. Diane noticed that both caches were in cedar trees, so we decided to search the cedar trees whenever we reached a waypoint and it seemed to be an effective strategy for at least finding the caches hidden by the Ntx team....and that's all I'm gonna say about that.
For the first half of our hike, we were walking along these great open greenbelts, then veering off on to smaller side trails, some that were rocky trails up into hilly areas with great briar bushes and cactuses. At one point, we were searching for a token when I unknowingly disturbed a bed of fireants. I

looked down and saw my shoes and pants were covered up to my knees. Luckily I managed to get them all off with only one bite (to the forearm, oddly enough). We also encountered this snake, which from one of Stan's forum postings in the past on the HGCS website I recognized to be a ribbon snake. I got tangled in briars going (the wrong way) to a cache and managed to snag three holes in my pants and get two long ugly scratches right above my knee. I had a cactus bud jump on to my forearm and that hurt pulling it out, and despite my sunscreen I managed to get a bit of a burn on my face.

We had a bit of a disagreement out on the trail about the rules. Each team had hidden nine tokens, and the tokens were worth more points than caches (we think, although that was another big issue - there was no posted point values so everything was a guess, and we had no idea how much anything was worth). When we were hunting one cache, we had been very close to a waypoint for a token, but it was designated "TS", which meant it was one of our team's, and some of us understood that we were NOT supposed to hunt our own tokens. The area we were in was fairly remote and there was no reason to come out this way again, so we wanted to check with our team leader. We had these radios, but we were so far out that we had no radio comm with anyone but each other. We tried calling Gary (aka TexasDreamweaver, aka our leader), but our cell phones didn't work out here, either. I got the idea to text him and his response was "ignore the TSs", so we moved on. Meanwhile, we carried on our debate about it. It made no sense to Tom for many reasons, and as we talked, us women began to understand the confusion as well. If we had ALL the waypoints for tokens downloaded, then there should be 27 in our GPSrs, but we only had 9, so it made sense that it would only be the 9 we were supposed to hunt, except that two of them were designated "TS" and we were told to ignore those. I sent Gary a repeat text about a half hour later, "are you sure?" and with our concerns, because we were still debating, but he never answered. If we had radio comm with base camp, we would have heard the announcement around this time that the rules had been changed at the last minute and Gary was not informed, and that we DID in fact need to hunt the "TS" tokens.

We kept on trucking regardless, and did manage to find one token. We reached a sign that said "low water crossing", and had to decide whether to try to walk across on the shifting logs or wade through the water. We voted wade. I should mention that most of the time on our walk, it was Diane calling the shots. She was the first to wade and the first to reach most of the cache sites. She was the official scorecard marker and would happily catch up with us as we began walking to the next cache. Diane is a two-time cancer survivor and she has a zest for life that is unmatched. She has this spritely "can-do" attitude that makes you just want to keep up and kick up your heels while you are at it. After each find, it was Diane pushing us along, "walk and talk, people! Let's get going!" She was right. We had a time limit and it was coming up fast.

The last hour of our hike was the hardest part. The terrain was rocky and varied grades. I really wanted to take pictures but we were moving so fast and I had to watch where I was putting my feet. We kept moving a quick rate, counting down the minutes we had left and asking casual hikers if we could cut on past them. We did managed to snag one last minute cache that luckily I spotted quickly, and then Tom led us off the path to the main road to the area where we turned in our scorecards. We could hear the official countdown - "FIVE minutes!" - as we made our way out of the woods. We got there four minutes before time and were so glad to have a breather and a water break (not that we weren't drinking the whole four hours of our mega-hike). Stan showed us his Evil Hide and we shared some laughs of our adventures before heading down wearily to base camp. On the way back, we all felt that we had done a very good job with our find numbers and had fun doing it.

The rest of the day, everyone relaxed in their chairs by the four different base camps. We had a (overpriced) BBQ luncheon at two, and the rest of the time we were recuperating, resting our feet, rehydrating, and waiting for the official announcement of the results.

Finally, it was time. I thoguht we had all done so well until the North Texas team announced, "And in fourth place," pulling out a shot-up ammo can and throwing it on the ground, "and we're real sorry about this guys, " he says, as he gives the ammo can a good kick, "Southeast Texas!" Darn! West Texas came in third, Centex second, and big surprise, North Texas won the Golden Ammo Can. They had 96 hunters compared to our 26, so we were just outnumbered, and the numerous rule changes did not help. As we returned to base camp, Gary aka TDW held up our bullet-hole ammo can and said "This is their rule book - full of holes!" Then he signed a big "First to Fourth" across it with a sharpie (this is the first year four teams have competed) and we all signed it, and talk it is will end up as a travel bug.

That night, there was a disco party planned by the San Antonio cacher AnthonyV. It was a great party for the half hour or so it lasted until the park ranger showed up and shut the thing down. Diane was there in a great white afro wig, disco dress, and white go-go boots, dancing and lauging. It was hilarious. Everyone was wondering who she was.

Afterwards, our team's high point earner MT Cachers came over to our campsite (as well as some drunk guy - did anyone catch who that was?) and Gary and I talked to them for a long while while Gary's cell phone kept chirping with text messages about newly published hides (someone was busy back in Houston). We talked about hiding caches, finding caches, FTF stories, night caches, and Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap is probably Houston's only 5/5 cache, and has a watchlist of 207 people with 96 finds and 395 notes. The notes, the finds, are some of the funniest, oddest things you will ever read. It is a Snoogans brainchild, and if you know Snoogans, you understand. He is a man with connections, and he will give you the caching experience of your life. We laughed about some of the logs we read, and TDW told of his own Quantum Leap find, which was very complicated and involved a wait in a cornfield for a bus with other Quantum Leap seekers and a trip to Jamaica for coffee.

Anyway, during this, I got a call from "grandma" who was laying the pressure on thick to come home by midafternoon for a family easter egg hunt. This curtailed my caching on the way home. We left in a rush and barely had time to sneak on and grab some GeoBreakfast (where eating a pancake earns you a smiley!) before hitting the road. I had been talking to my dear friend Elisa of Georeynozos about caching together on the way home, but we were rushing now and I didn't think I would catch her. I actually called her about two hours from home, but she didn't pick up. About an hour later, we stopped at a rest stop to use the facilities, which just happened to have one of my bookmarked caches at it. We were headed down the nature trail and I was just thinking this girl looked like Elisa's daughter when I heard my name, and there she was! So we did a cache together after all.

A weekend of caching and hiking, and all I scored was 12 finds, but in the end it was good for my child to do the family easter egg hunt and the youngest missed me. This weekend, it was more about the adventure and the experiences than it was about the numbers. I did have fun, and I hope to go to more Challenges in the future. For now, though, I am taking it easy and resting up for a big caching trip this weekend!

I am so proud of the SEtx team and I think we all did really well at the Challenge. First to Fourth Flamingos, way to go!