The Nathaniel Trail consists of 17 caches. Because all 17 are part of the geoart, please don't forget to do your homework before setting out to find these caches. For 14 of them, you'll need to enter a simple solution into Certitude in order to receive the actual coordinates for those hides. To find caches 15-17, you'll need to carefully collect information from each of the 14 caches. Some of the trails are used by equestrians, so be prepared to yield to riders. And please pay attention to hunting regulations and schedules. Wearing international orange is never a bad idea. I've never seen one in Carroll County, but a bear was sighted in this area in December 2018, and others have been reported in backyards in Carroll recently. So be careful as you hike these woods. I strongly urge you to solve all the little puzzles BEFORE you head for the trails. All 17 caches could be found in a couple or three hours and three or four miles of relatively easy walking. If you love birds, remember your binocular. And if you don't love ticks, remember your Deet or chemical of choice. As you cache, may you find joy and peace.
After the CAM picnic of 2018, I joined about eight fine cachers for some CAM bonuses. The day had been misty, but the mist was so light that I joked that if it were any lighter, we’d have to call it fog. As we left our cars at the near end of Utica Covered Bridge, I decided I wasn’t interested in joining the discussion with some other cachers already at the site, so I moseyed through the bridge, savoring its architecture and craftsmanship. When I exited the far end, I turned right, took a diagonal approach towards the bottom of the very, very gentle slope in order to get beneath the bridge—and slipped. I suppose, technically, I broke my fibula not when I slipped but when my foot regained traction, dug in, and proved that my weight was just a little too much for the angle at which my right ankle was now planted. Details of the next hour or so are a bit fuzzy to me, but they were thoroughly embarrassing—except that I was surrounded by great people who were friends determined to help me. And one was even Nurse JAF, thank goodness! In the next weeks, I would develop a slightly better sense of what caching was like for Nathaniel. And I’d remember even more often than I ordinarily did (which was about a hundred times a year) having fallen while holding Nathaniel on a more arduous woods walk years ago on our property near a hamlet known as Needmore, PA. On that day, Nathaniel indicated he wanted to make the trip farther up the mountain with his brothers and cousin and uncle and me—but I was positive I couldn’t make the contemplated hike if he kept his very heavy steel leg braces on. His mother and I agreed that it meant so much to Nathaniel to be included in this lark that we’d remove the braces and I’d carry him in front of me, one arm beneath his butt, the other behind his back. That was safe, we thought, at least up to a point. However, I hadn’t reckoned on the consequences of not being able to see ahead as well as I would if I hadn’t been carrying Nathaniel in front of me. About a third of the way up the mountain, my left foot found the near edge of a large rock, which at first held my weight and Nathaniel’s; then the unsupported near edge yielded to my weight, tilted, and forced me to lose my balance. I pitched forward. To protect Nathaniel, I tried to pirouette, desperately clutching Nathaniel tighter to my chest as I rolled around, preparing to land on my back on the very rocky ground. I accomplished my purpose: Nathaniel landed on my chest. But I hadn’t thought quickly enough to shift my right hand from just beneath his butt to his legs, which had swung around rapidly—way too rapidly—in a semi-circle, and then, just as quickly as they had accelerated in my pirouette, they had, ineluctably, stopped. I heard the crack and prayed it was a small branch breaking under our weight. It was one of Nathaniel’s legs. In the next few moments, as I tried to stand up, I could feel the two pieces of the femur grating upon each other. We had a horrendously slow descent, trying to keep especially his broken leg still. More than two hours later, the bone set, Nathaniel was in what was called a spica cast, which covered him from just below his armpits to his toes—on BOTH legs, since the weight of a cast on just one leg would have caused even more catastrophic harm to his wee, brittle body. Needless to say, I second-guessed myself often over the years about the decision to remove Nathaniel’s braces. The doctors tried to comfort me with uplifting thoughts about inclusion, but hindsight is not merely 20-20: it is relentlessly unforgiving. By the way, in one of the photos included in these cache descriptions, you can see Nathaniel in that cast, lying in a prone position on a modified wheelchair and staring with wonder at a barred owl. Bringing that owl to him since he couldn’t accompany me very easily on that raptor-catching excursion seemed the least I could do for him.
So when I fell at Utica Bridge in 2018, my being limited in terms of locomotion seemed to draw Nathaniel and me a tad closer together. And in one of the photos attached to this description, you can see that, from within the geomobile, I used my crutch to fetch a cache container to the window, much to Nathaniel’s (and JAF’s) delight. Sometimes you gotta improvise!
To receive from Certitude the actual coordinates for this hide, please enter, without spacing or punctuation, the names of the two birds Phos4s heard singing both times he visited the 2018 CAM Icebreaker cache. Needless to say, both of his visits were BEFORE his mishap at Utica Bridge.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.