If I Only Had a Brain Traditional Cache
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(regular)
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Whoever decided to try to build a reservoir over a base of porous limestone must surely have been in the "If I Only Had a Brain" mode.
This cache is in cool little park that surrounds a true goof up by early city officials. In 1818 the city of Bloomington, Indiana, was founded and a well was drilled on the courthouse square to supply the city with water. It wasn't sufficient, and a series of cisterns around town was set up around 1860 (also found wanting). In 1885 they took another shot at the courthouse well, this time drilling down to 2,670 feet (Yow!) and being rewarded with... uh... nothing. Around 1891 the idea to build a water retaining basin was tried, resulting in the northern most of the "Twin Lakes" on the west side of Bloomington. This silted up pretty quick (to the point where it's now the Twin Lakes Softball fields), and the second "Twin lake" on the south side of west 2nd didn't fair much better. (Actually, the beaver dam that is still active in the south lake is pretty cool, and works better than anything the early Bloomingtonians built!) (Oh yeah, there's a couple caches around the "lakes".) Soooo... vowing to get it right this time, the city built the Leonard Springs dam in 1915. It sucked. The whole basin is porous limestone, so the stupid thing never got more than slightly full, leaving a gracefully built but essentially useless gate control tower sticking up out of the mud. (That's still there.) At one point, I.U. had a narrow gauge rail road running from this "reservoir" to the old I.U. location at Seminary Square (now a small park full of panhandling pain-in-the-butt bums at Second and College.) If you poke around the Leonard Springs park you can find some old lengths of the original rail road track. Anyway, this thing never really worked out and I.U. almost left Bloomington over the water fiasco. Finally, they got it right and built Lake Griffy in 1924 and it worked!!! Leonard Springs continued to supply some water to Bloomington until it was finally abandoned in 1943. Shortly thereafter, the dam collapsed (great engineering there, guys!) leaving a pretty impressive mess of concrete and re-bar, and a lot of cool hiding spots for geo-caching! (Yippee!) And of course, in anticipation of the game of Geocaching, the Army Corp of Engineers got to work on Lake Monroe, (Geocache heaven!) and finished it up around 1964. But then they had to stall with a story about using it to supply Bloomington with water until the actual invention of Geocaching on May 3rd, 2000 by Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Oregon. His original hide, listed on the old usenet system, was found only three days later by Mike Teague of Vancouver, Washington, the first ever FTF. But I digress...
This cache is hidden well somewhere in the remains of the ill-concieved and ill-fated Leonard Springs dam. BE CAREFUL! Though the city considers this area safe enough to be open as a park the terrain does demand your attention due to jagged concrete and exposed re-bar. BRING A FLASHLIGHT! Prize for the FTF is a "race day only" pin from this year's Indy 500. Good Luck!
Cache on! -Monstercatambush
(Oh yeah, I guess another reason this one could be called "If I Only Had a Brain" would be due to me being an idiot. I got so wrapped up in finding a nifty cache spot that I stayed out well after dark... and hiked all the way out leaving my GPSr on a rock by the dam! So... I got to hike BACK in there the next day! Thankfully, the spot is remote enough that no one had taken my e-trex! Dumb dumb dumb!)
(Oh yeah again... if you bushwhack in around the west side of the swamp there is a LOT of stinging nettles... believe me... I know.)
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
penjy va, ybbx nebhaq
Treasures
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