Brian Bear

This poor cache must have been submerged in one or two feet of flood waters over the past few weeks. It's amazing that it didn't get sucked out of the knot hole in which it was hidden by the swirling waters, and wind up in the Potomac River.

The forecast was for a nice Washington, DC summer geocaching day: mid-80's (F), no rain or thunderstorms, and manageable relative humidity (70 percent). So, I hit the road about 1100 to pick up a few Maryland caches that were rained out from the 4th of July geocaching trip.

This cache is located in a very large regional park, not far from Washington, DC and just a few kilometers from Northern Virginia, across the American Legion Bridge (which carries the capital beltway, Interstate 495, across the Potomac River).

This turned out to be the last cache of the day. After leaving Spooky Ridge, I headed north into Maryland. I got to within about 10 meters of the next cache, and the heavens opened up. I had a 15 minute hike back to the car in a severe thunderstorm with torrential rains. Ugh.

I started out this morning on a caching trip to Maryland, and wanted to find three caches in Virginia on the way. I found the first two Virginia caches, and decided against the third because it was so far out of my way, and it wasn't visited very often (I'll find it later).

I wasn't confident that we'd find this one. We were supposed to be on our way to the Juneau airport to catch a flight to get us closer to Washington, DC, but we had just enough time (maybe) for one more cache. We went to 6th Street to cut down transit time, jumped out of the truck, and headed into a rain forest GPS "black hole". We dead reckoned into the forest until we reached the cliff. Without a decent signal, things weren't looking good for the away team. Never discouraged by such small matters, wilsonlm quickly expanded the search radius, and made the find. wilsonse took care of the cache log, then we were off to the truck again. We made it to the airport with plenty of minutes to spare.

We found the remains of a porcupine on the way to the cache, which was pretty interesting.

I look forward to returning to the area to explore and learn more about mining history in the Juneau area.

This was our last cache in Alaska for a while; we're off to Northern Virginia!