You've all heard of Sam, of course, though perhaps only his
surname. And you might not have realized that's what it was. Even
that was a near miss. If things had gone a little differently, it
could have been Al you were talking about all this time. Some would
say that by rights it SHOULD be Al anyway. You'll probably want to
do your own reading on the subject, but from what i can tell, Sam
had the idea and Al perfected it for him. Or maybe it was a
different, better, idea that Al had. Either way, it got a further
fine tuning by Gerke in 1848 and became an international standard
in 1865.
But on to the cache puzzle. If you read a little bit about Al
(or Alfred, as he might rather be called) and consider the name of
this cache, you might be able to make some sense of these
coordinates:
TE SM EH IS SA MD UM IW
AT GI OI HE TB MG JT EJ
Don't make it harder than it is, though. Al's invention was
great for the time, but i'm more familiar with the modern version,
so that's what's in use here.
The cache is on NC Gamelands, so:
- Wear blaze orange during hunting season
- Consider purchasing a hunting license and Game Lands permit,
even if you are not a hunter. The money generated by licenses helps
contribute to the protection and management of over 2 million acres
of Game Lands in the state.
More information about hunting seasons and licenses can be found at
www.ncwildlife.org It's an easy**
hike along a sewer cut until you are about 150ft from the cache. Oh
yeah, i forgot to mention. The easy** hike is through a knee-high
mixture of grass and poison-ivy, so long pants are recommended.
**Unless of course the I-40 Waterfowl impoundment is flooded, in
which case the primary access route may be covered in knee to
waist-high water and you may have to find an alternate route in.
This page seems
to show the current status of the impoundments. I'm not sure
how up to date it is, though.