This cache is placed in Pace Bend Park, a Travis County Park located approximately 30 miles west of Austin on Lake Travis. The park is open 7 days a week from sunrise to 9pm for day-use visitors with overnight camping available. There is a fee to enter the park. Please be respectful of the posted signs and the other people using the park. This cache is placed in accordance with the guidelines for geocaches by the Travis County Park system.
For as many good guys as there are in our story, there are an equal number of bad guys. Saruman is one such bad guy who aligns himself with the Dark Lord Sauron acting as his puppet. He is the key to finding Isengard.
Background
Early in the The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf describes Saruman as "the chief of my order" and notes his great knowledge of the magic rings created by Sauron and by the Elven-smiths. After Frodo and Gandalf are reunited at Rivendell midway through Fellowship, the wizard explains why he failed to join Frodo: he had been summoned to consult with Saruman. Believing Sauron's victory to be inevitable, Saruman had proposed an alliance with Sauron. When Gandalf refused, Saruman imprisoned him in the tower of Orthanc at Isengard, hoping to learn from him the location of the Ring. Gandalf observed that Saruman was creating his own army of orcs and wolves, "in rivalry of Sauron, and not in his service yet." This is an evolution from the earliest outline, in which Saruman was apparently directly serving Sauron. The knowledge of Saruman's treachery became a key point in the decisions taken on how to deal with the Ring.
Most of the action in the first half of the The Two Towers, is provided by the conflict between Saruman's forces and the Kingdom of Rohan. Orcs from Saruman's army attack Frodo and his companions at the start of the book, searching for the Ring. Having betrayed Sauron by attempting unsuccessfully to seize the Ring for himself, Saruman's ruin is completed when his army is defeated by the Rohirrim and Isengard destroyed by the Ents, who were outraged by his destruction of their forests to feed his forges. Saruman himself is not directly involved, and only appears again in chapter X, The Voice of Saruman, trapped in Orthanc. He fails in his attempt to make peace with the Rohirrim and with Gandalf, and rejects Gandalf's conditional offer to let him go free. Gandalf casts him from the White Council and the order of the wizards.
Saruman's final appearance is at the end of The Return of the King, after Sauron's defeat. He persuades the Ents to release him from Orthanc, and travels on foot as a beggar to the Shire, the Hobbits' homeland, which his agents are already forcing through a wilfully destructive process of modernisation. In the chapter The Scouring of the Shire, the Hobbits rebel under the leadership of Frodo and his companions and defeat the intruders. Saruman is set free, even after attempting to kill Frodo, but is murdered by his own much-abused servant Gríma Wormtongue.