bernsa: Wimpy Tricolor was my final thank you to my friends here in Central Jersey. My discovery of this area occurred after I had moved to Virginia, and came as a surprise to me. I stumbled across it accidentally while doing research into the railroad. The genesis of this cache started with Satellite Recon relating to some local legend of a hidden road crossing relating to the railroad. I thought I had found what I was looking for in the overpass at Stage 1, but it turned out to be something more mysterious to me. On the other side was an old road and a trailhead into a branching area of an unmarked (nearly abandoned looking) trail system. After some exploration I was shocked to find myself in the back side of Poricy Park. An interesting and surprising short cut!
The name Wimpy Tricolor was an anagram for Wilmort-Poricy, the names of the two parks this cache connected. In my mind, this was always fodder for a multistage cache mimicking my path of discovery. It started at Wilmort, and worked its way to one of the more interesting areas in the unmarked trail system (Called the “Pond Tract” on the maps). It seems the trails here are quite popular with the teens and evidence was found of campfires, end of school celebrations, and all that goes with that. The 2nd stage was near a small clearing that overlooked Poricy Pond in a dead tree that for the most part while the cache was active, hadn’t changed too much. The tree was awesome, lots of hidey holes, and areas to stick a cache. I perhaps was a little too trusting thinking LnLs could survive the natural human instinct to explore this tree. I think I recall at least 2 distinct mugglings of Stage 2. Stage 3, I wanted to show off the awesome platform bridge that connects the Pond Tract to the Bird Watching Area of Poricy (the blue trails). It took a bit to find a decent hiding spot for the final stage, but about 500 feet down the easternmost arm of the blue trail system is where I found a nice spot just off the trail with enough cover. I never had any problems with Stage 3, it was always secure as a bug.
I put a bit of effort into trying to come up with 3 increasing sized containers and custom camouflage. Stage 1 was my 2nd attempt at LEGO constructed containers, and based off my “mini ammo can” design. I can’t prove it, but I think this design was the inspiration for the Groundspeak LEGO products after I shared a copy and story with some vendors at BrickFair. (And I think that’s cool!) It was simple and quite effective. It was a typical modern urban hide style typical of nanos, magnetically attached to a sign. Unfortunately, this too got muggled and it spelled the end of the fun for me with this cache.
S1 was quite challenging to find a suitable location. Once compromised, I never felt comfortable reusing that spot/hide style. Once S2 was muggled again, I was ready to retire the cache. It has served its purpose, and visitation was quite sparse. I was doing more maintenance visits than it was getting finders. I’m sure as a traditional, S3 could be successful, but it wasn’t the same for me and my availability to perform maintenance is more limited than expected, so I’m not republishing S3. S2 was cool, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth, but still would like to see the Pond Tract have more caches in it. Sorry to my friend NikCap who tried after S2 vanished again.
First Stage: N 40° 21.980 W 074° 05.459 (original coordinates)
Second Stage: N 40° 21.798 W 074° 05.521 (final starting coordinates)
Third stage: N 40° 21.885 W 074° 05.647 (now publicly viewable)
Thanks for visiting!
Wimpy Tricolor (GC3K5M0) was active from July 1, 2012 to February 25, 2017 (4 years, 8 months, and 25 days). In that time there were 24 finds, 4 DNFs, and 8 TBs that traveled through the cache. It had 8 Favorite Points at the time it was archived.
Congratulations to jimmyg7929 for the FTF!
Honorable mention to Jo.Cap for STF and Ericles for TTF.