Thar She Blows Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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A short walk at the Pine Ridge viewpoint.
A chat with locals of the area will often bring up the topic of wind. Don't you believe them. I struggled to put out this cache while the clouds were hanging over the mountains to the west. No known wind would have been able to catch up to whatever was blowing that day.
Finding a suitable location for the cache turned out to be difficult. I lost the first 3 containers as they simply disappeared during the short trip from my hand to the ground. All of the nearby rocks looked like they weighed a few tons, which at least explained their presence. I crawled around (walking was impossible) and managed to find a couple of rocks that were of a more modest size and once I had them in my hands I was able to stand up without being blown away.
The next task was to find a place for the container. This was also a challenge. But I finally spotted a location that looked promising. I carefully held onto the container and then placed the two rocks on top of it. Big mistake. I was immediately airborne and was just lucky to grab onto the side of the truck as I flew by. That life-saving maneuver wrenched my arm out of its socket but at least I was still at the viewpoint. I still wasn't confident that the cache container would stay where it was put until the First To Find cacher arrived so I began crawling around looking for a few more rocks to add to the site. This time I always kept one rock in my hand and only put the other rocks onto the pile.
The last task was to obtain some coordinates for the hide. This turned out to be impossible. The numbers flew off the screen as soon as they appeared. This was not a big problem as I had read about averaging the results of about 10 readings and so I waited until I got home and then averaged the coordinates from my last 10 finds. That was so easy I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before. I already have the coordinates computed for my next 5 hides.
The last step was to fill in the form for the cache. This posed a bit of a dilemma. How to rate the difficulty and terrain? While I was there the two numbers that came to mind were 9 and 9, but the only choices were between 1 and 5. I finally decided to use both numbers to capture the sense of the possible range, giving values of 1.5 and 1.5.
Special note to all geocachers: Please be sure to place a couple of rocks on top of the container when you replace it. It might be a good idea to bring a couple of rocks with you when you come searching, but remember to always keep one with you at all times.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Haqre n fznyy cvyr bs ebpxf.
Treasures
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