ADVENTURES IN CACHING

George Bush Park

This 7800 acre park in west Houston, formerly named Cullen-Barker, has the distinction of being the sixth largest city park in the nation. It covers a vast amount of territory, and offers many opportunities for outdoor recreation, including, naturally, geocaching as one of them.

The park boasts an extraordinary amount of caches hidden in it (at my rough count, about 62). Now, cache to acre, that's not that high of a density, coming out to be about one cache per 125 acres. Part of that reason, I suspect, is that the area lies in a flood plain, making it impossible to get into some areas of the park after a good rain. It might have something to do with accessibility, too, with a good part of it covered in thick forest, or a lack of places to hide, with many acres devoted to soccer fields and a shooting range. It also has an element of danger to it, with feral hogs that roam the land. It would not be wise to be out on the trail alone.

This day, I met up with another geocaching family to tackle a cluster of caches together. We had originally planned on having another family with us, and more kids, but it ended up being just me, and their family of four, plus their dog and one of mine. We met up at a park and grab cache near a large open field used for free flying model airplanes. The other family was about twenty minutes behind me, so Scout and I watched the planes doing kamikaze maneuvers in the field before they showed up and we hunted the cache together. I had kinda looked before and found a likely hiding spot, and might have DNFed if they didn't have their laptop with them, and were able to look up previous logs and notice mention that it was NOT in that likely spot.

After this, we moved the cars to a parking area for an equestrian trail and a hiking trail that led along a grassy pipeline area. We made a decision to just go after every other cache along this way, in which lay about six in a row. It was a great idea in theory, except that we forgot, until we got to the end, about the fact that three of them were a series building to a final cache along the same way, and that one we had skipped had parts of the coordinates in it for the final! It turned out okay, because we gambled that it would be right along the edge of the path, like the others, and we had the last three digits of both the north and the western coordinates, so we were able to find it anyway before turning back around. We even found, slightly by accident, a small cache that held the key in it that we would need to get to open the final - the bit of a trick at the end, when you reach the cache and see you have to hunt the key first. We were fortious that we didn't have to turn back for it after all.

We could see that this area could get quite swampy at times. We found bits of crawfish shells and tracks of wild animals, but not really any deep mud or wet areas, which is amazing, after this week's rain and snow(!). It was probably one of the best times to work this park, when it was too cool for mossies, but warm enough to hike with only one layer on. When I left the house that morning, it was fifty five degrees, and it warmed up about twenty degrees during the four hours we spent exploring the park. The sound of gunfire was continuous during our hike, due to the nearby shooting range. Who knew? I didn't even realize this park had one, nor that it would be so loud, and so well used!

My favorites of this section were the series final, (called "State of Confusion", with the first three containers, decons, titled with the intials for Texas, Idaho, and Maine), and another cache called Badger Poking 101. The latter cache was titled in a teasing reference to one of the HGCS class clowns, that the others like to goade into reactions. In fact, the "badger" itself had his log nominated for our cache awards last year for "Funniest Log" (it's the second log on there, if you have an account and want to read it).

This scene on the right was what it looked like 360 degrees around at the cache site. Try finding your way out of this one without tripping, falling, getting caught up in branches, keeping two dog leashes from getting tangled, guiding two little girls through, and watching out for snakes and muddy patches. It is a little bit of a challenge (though luckily, only like two hundred feet off the trail).

After this, we made our way back ot the parking area, where we watered the dogs and ourselves before heading for the other direction. We saw some beautiful horses, a paint and a black gelding, preparing for their morning ride through the forest trail. Then we hunted two along the paved hiking path, then turned around to catch a cluster on the northern side of the trail. One of them was about four hundred feet in, and a little darker and wetter than the other side. It was supposed to be near traces of an old corral, but all we saw was barbed wire.

The rest of the caches were along the edges of an open area bordered by forest in a large semicircle. We could see the water line along the trees, probably from Hurricane Ike but poossibly from genenral flooding. Check out the dark line along all the vegetation showing how high the waters came in the park. You can see how most of these caches were ammo cans secured high in trees along this forest edge. The girls from this other family were getting tired now, and not too thrilled about going after more caches, but the adults were determined and kept a bright face as we continued far in and around. We kept having this joke about how I was letting "Random Confusion", the husband in this caching family, find all the caches for me. He was walking out in front, doing recon, as "Skyfire" and I kept back with the girls and dogs. At one cache, they joked that he should let me find this one, and I said, "nah, I'll let you", but then I did end up finding it first, because I ended up turning towards the forest sooner. We had a good laugh about this.

We didn't see any wildlife in the park this day, except for some interesting birds. I saw none of the feral hogs rumored to be around here. The girls and I did, though, find this really pretty vine, or plant, growing up inside this tree on the left.

We had a really good day, with the final count, including the two park and grabs we found on the way out of the park, totaling sixteen finds. Afterwards, I was very hungry! Our hike was a good distance covered, and wore out the dogs, but I had no soreness or fatigue after. It was simply invigorating to be out in the forest, exploring nature and getting some exercise, on a nice winter day in Houston with a very lovely family. I ended up leaving three travel bugs and a geocoin in the caches, and traded for twenty yen in one cache (I actually had no trade items, but one of the girls donated for me). I actually wished I had brought more trading swag this day because two of the caches had Andrew Jackson silver dollars in them. From the Badger Poking 101 cache, I picked up a Red Jeep that can now keep my White Jeep company (That's a story for another day).

It was great fun. Now, today I am going to the craft store for materials to put the finishing touches on a fun Christmas series I am putting out. Tell ya about it later...;)!