The Long Overdue Asheville Report

Sometimes you just have to do something that doesn’t make sense. So when my friend Zgrav suggested driving nine hours to Asheville, North Carolina to go geocaching, I said, “heck, yeah!” Before I continue, a little background on the sport. Geocaching is a GPS-assisted treasure hunting game. You use your GPS to guide you to a spots where people have hidden little “caches” – containers ranging in size from pinky-tip up to briefcase size. The real point of the game is in the hunting rather than the finding – sort of like catch-and-release fishing. Geocaches each carry a two dimensional rating –difficulty and terrain – as to how hard they are to find. The easiest ones you can drive right up to. At the opposite extreme, there are geocaches that require solving hard puzzles, use of a specialized gear (helicopters, free-climbing, SCUBA) and a host of other challenges. The most challenging cache level is 5/5. Asheville is overall something of a caching mecca, and is home to a couple of 5/5 caches that were reputed to be outstanding. These 5/5’s were Zgrav’s targets. Ted and I had never done a 5/5 before, and we were eager to join in.

I picked Ted up early from school on Thursday and we got right on the road. The drive down seemed very long and somewhere along I81 I started to question the wisdom of the trip. My spirits sank even further when we stopped to take a break at Harrisonburg. I chose this spot to take a break because James Madison University is there and I want to slowly begin introducing Ted to colleges. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we took a nice stroll around the JMU campus. The only problem is that we, of course, wanted to pick up a few quick geocache finds while we were there. Unfortunately, the location of the first cache we tried was mobbed with people going on tours of the campus (that’ll be us soon enough). The second one stumped us, and we were chased away from the third one by campus police when we were just 40 feet away from grabbing it. Dejected, we grabbed a Frappucino at the campus Starbucks and hit the highway to finish our drive.

We had arranged to meet Zgrav and 4EverYoungs (I should explain that I’m using people’s geocaching names rather than their real names here) for breakfast the next morning at the local IHOP. Ted and I strolled in pretty well rested. The two of them had left later Thursday and had driven through the night to get to Asheville and so were pretty tired. We were also joined by Bubba Q Jack, who had made the trip as well and Asheville caching legend Ozguff. We lingered too long over breakfast before (after picking up a quick cache right in the IHOP parking lot) heading out to start our first 5/5, called “Toobe TTorcher II”. [Note that throughout this log I have intentionally misspelled the cache names so that future seekers of these caches cannot easily find the information I have provided here – which might spoil some of the fun for them]

Geocaches are listed online at site called, naturally, Geocaching.com. The cache hider provides some description of the cache, and each person who logs it can add information as well. From reading the cache description and logs we figured we’d be spending time in water tunnels and that it would be a tough slog. Here’s the list of items recommended for folks attempting the cache: “FIRST AID KIT, Good detailed topo/road map of area or maps on GPS, At least two good flashlights with extra batteries (hands-free headlights are best), Climbing harness with a short length of GOOD safety rope/webbing and at least one carabineer. (If you are in good shape, or an experienced climber and not afraid of heights you may not need this item—but we recommend it for safety.), Old, warm clothes and shoes/boots that you don’t mind getting dirty/wet/torn, A GOOD pair of gloves, rubber boots – Optional, Kneepads HIGHLY recommended, Notepad and pen, and a camera (you’ll wish you had it!).” Ooof.

I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say we saw a lot of the inside of Asheville’s stormwater management system. We quickly figured out that each stage of the cache (and there were many) contained clues to finding later stages. Ozguff accompanied us to the first stage of the cache, where we picked up a multi-page packet that you used to fill in information from each stage as you went along. Actually, since we took the last packet, we made a quick detour to a Staples and made some more copies to restock Stage 1 before attacking the next stage – cachers are generally pretty good about maintaining each other’s caches. The first “real” stage found us crawling through some pretty tight corrugated metal pipes looking for the next clue. Each stage got progressively harder and more interesting. There were tiny tunnels to crawl through and big tunnels you could have driven through. There was darkness. And, of course, water. I had my neoprene boots on, which kept my feet dry. The others, in hiking boots, resigned themselves to wet feet.

After 7-8 hours of this, we realized we needed to quit for the day, since we had another 5/5 to take on that night. So we did a quick scoping of the next stage, then headed back to our hotels for a quick break before heading to “Athena’s KKurse.” Ted and I got lost trying to find our way back to a Panera we had passed earlier (yes, we had a GPS receiver) and settled for dinner at Burger King for the second night in a row, then headed further south.

There are certain geocaches that can only be done at night. Athena’s KKurse is one of these, and it’s another 5/5 to boot. The cache is located in rural southern North Carolina (not far from northern South Carolina) on, and this is unusual, the expansive private property of the cache owner, Shymntmn. You have to get his permission before taking on the cache, and he keeps a sharp eye out as you roam his property. A bunch of us (not just Zgrav, 4EverYoungs, Ted and me, but also Bubba Q, Reedkickball and a few other caching friends) met up at the listed coordinates at about 8:30. By 9 PM it was dark and we started our search. Some other local North Carolina cachers who had previously done this cache turned out to see us off – mostly they were just heckling us as we looked for the first stage, and happily they left us soon thereafter. Shymntmn was also there to get us started. He was a really nice guy, and turned up spookily throughout the night to help keep us on the right track. Whenever our group seemed stumped, we’d suddenly smell cigar smoke and Shymntmn would appear out of nowhere, cigar in hand to give us little hints in his clipped German accent. After a while we realized he was using an ATV and a different set of trails to get from stage to stage.

We couldn’t have picked a better night. It was perfectly clear and the stars were out in force. The night hike would have been worth it even without the cache, and the cache would have been worth it even in the worst weather. But to do this cache on a nice night – perfect. Again, I will not spoil the cache by describing any of its many stages. I will only say that Shymntmn invested considerable time and money in this cache. Going way up in the air, using multiple wavelengths of light, codes aplenty, hidden items, and more. Each stage would have been a memorable experience on its own. As with Toobe TTorcher, you had to gather information as you went along, and once again I took on the job of scribe, to make sure we got everything recorded correctly. The entire experience took about six hours. Six incredible hours doing the weirdest things in the woods in the middle of the night. We staggered back to our cars some time after 3 AM, exhausted and happy, having successfully completed the cache. How I made the 45 minute drive back to Asheville I don’t know. Ted and I plopped into bed about 4 AM.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t sleep in the next morning, for we had arranged to meet up with Zgrav and 4EverYoungs to continue our pursuit of Toobe TTorcher. When the four of us met up again, Ted and I looked a little haggard. The other guys, now operating on two nights of virtually no sleep, looked even worse. Undaunted, we picked up where we left off. We had figured out that we could save some crawling if we managed to pull up a storm drain grate on the entry road to a local big box store and drop into the middle of a storm drain rather than crawling up all the way from the end. Zgrav and I took advantage of a break in the flow of traffic and managed to yank up the grate (they’re heavy!). We dropped 4EverYoungs down the hole, then quickly put the grate back. Zgrav, Ted and I then positioned ourselves at various storm drain grating along the way so we could keep track of our teammate. What people must have thought of us as we talked into the storm drains I don’t know, but fortunately, Asheville is a pretty offbeat place – I guess they had all seen oddball behavior before.

Once again, we spent all day crawling through the Asheville underground, finding strange glyphs on the tunnel walls, doing more “duck-walking” than I care to think about, missing some clues but using our smarts to figure them out, finding new accesses to stages because new construction had changed the old one, until the final clue led us to … the middle of the street at a new suburban-urban center?! We were flummoxed. This locale didn’t fit anything else we had seen along the way, and certainly didn’t seem like the right final location for a 5/5 cache. We searched every square inch of the place – again, we must have looked a sight, all grubby from a day of subterranean exploration – but couldn’t find anything. We retreated back to our cars, where we reviewed our data. Still nothing. We were starting to lose our light as well. Finally we broke down and called Ozguff. By coincidence, we were in his neighborhood. He said he’d come down and meet us and was there in a flash. Taking a look at our data, he surmised we had transposed two digits in one of the latitude/longitude numbers. Something had actually seemed strange to us about this earlier, but again, there was new construction in a spot such that we had become convinced we were heading the wrong way when in fact we were close to the final stage. Ozguff accompanied us to the final stage, where we happily logged our triumph of having completed our second 5/5 cache of the weekend. Ironically, on the way back to the car I slipped while crossing some deep water and got my feet wet – after two days of keeping them totally dry while slogging endlessly through water.

Again, Zgrav, 4EverYoungs, Ted and I retreated to our hotels and cleaned up. Zgrav used to live in Asheville and we met up and went out for dinner at a funky pizza place near the university. We were all feeling a combination of exhilaration, exhaustion, and hunger. We wolfed down a couple of excellent pizzas and some beer (well, not Ted) in celebration.

I have always wanted to visit Asheville, but on this trip so far I had seen mostly the insides of the public works, so I vowed that on Sunday Ted and I were going to do some sight-seeing before heading out. Unfortunately, we awoke to a steady rain on Sunday so our sightseeing was cut short. We drove around downtown a bit (yes, we found a few easy geocaches), visited the botanical gardens (again, to log a cache), had lunch at a surprisingly good Mexican restaurant, then headed for home.

Some day I must get back to Asheville and see the normal sights.

Note: This trip took place in mid-April. Two months later, no one else has logged Toobe TTorcher. It's a tough one.

Outrunning the Quiet Storm

It's been a rainy week. Not just the usual Washington summer afternoon thunderstorms, but heavy downpours 5 AM thunderstorms, flash flood warnings, the works. So it was with a severe weather watch in place and some trepidation that I headed down to Columbia Island last night. The consoling factor was that I had checked the weather report right before heading out from work, and the skies looked like they would be largely clear until about 9 PM.

My friend Dave has a new fixation with doing yoga warmups before paddling. I think he has been influenced by both Dubside and our friend Gina, who is a yoga instructor in addition to being a paddler. Interestingly, I had been thinking just the day before, when doing my 20 minutes of stretching before my 40 minute run, that it's funny that I stretch so much for running and erg-ing, but not at all for kayaking. So, when Dave suggested yoga, I was happy to take part. We must have been quite a sight, about half a dozen of us going through various asanas on the grass at the marina, while getting dampened by a light sprinkle of rain.

The weather held and the trip was spectacular. The birds were out (kingfishers, wood ducks, night and blue herons). When we got up to Georgetown the water was filled with crew shells practicing. It was just a wonderful feeling - all the hustle and bustle on the river. Six-person shells, singles, racing canoes, our group of eight. It felt like a secret society of the river, with all of us out enjoying the evening in our people-powered boats, with nary a powerboat in sight. The water is still a little cool and the rain had washed all sorts of chunky stuff into it, so I held off from rolling (the brown chunkiness of the water didn't stop Dave and Nelson, though).

As we started to head back the wind picked up. Leery that this meant the forecast severe thunderstorms were imminenty, I picked up my pace and pushed back to the marina at a more rapid clip. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. The weather was still fine when we got back, which gave us a chance to spread out and have our potluck as planned - a fine spread of cheeses, dolma, veggies, hummus, bulgar salad, fruit tart, chocolate babka, and more. Being National Park Service property, I am certain that we did not drink wine. Just a rather large juicebox of grape juice.

I arrived home stuffed and happy.

Mindfull vs. ... unmindful? mindless?

Last weekend I went hiking with Ted at theBull Run Nature Conservancy. As usual, our hike had several purposes. Of course, there's the basic enjoyment of hiking. But Ted is also training for a week-long Scout backpacking trip in July and is trying to do as much hiking as possible in preparation. Needless to say, we were on the trail of a geocache as well. I had already found this one, but Ted hadn't.

As we hiked, I decided to try out a mindfulness technique I had read about in the book "A Wild Faith". What you do is bring your concentration into the moment by focusing on various things, first in succession, then sharing your attention among them. The feel of the soles of your feet as you walk. The appearance of the forest around you. Your breath. I find I can maintain this combined focus for only brief periods, but during those periods I'm very much in the moment. Then the monkey mind kicks in again and I start to wander off into thought. Another thing about doing this kind of mindfulness practice is that it doesn't leave much room for conversation. So, while I did it we hiked silently, which is fine - but it would be hard to maintain for a long time or with a larger group. I enjoyed the exercise.

Today, in contrast, I had a very unmindful kayak trip. I got to Occoquan Park early before the Chesapeake Paddlers Associations Gear Day, so I hit the water for a while. It was a pretty morning, but I kept getting very lost in thought about other things - primarily financial things, which I guess are a preoccupation for everyone these days. Every once in a while I'd wake up and realize I was in the middle of this gorgeous kayak trip, then I'd zone out back into my thoughts. I think I have to figure out a kayaking mindfulness technique. The only thing that really sort of served that purpose today was when I was focusing on my stroke. A focus on paddling form keeps you in the moment in its own way. Applying tips learned from various paddling experts. Watching the speed indicator on the GPS as you fine tune the stroke. Adjusting the blade angle and entry to avoid splashes. Checking for torso rotation. Focused. Moving faster. Yes.

The Eight Foot Wilderness

There’s a corner of my garden that’s wild. This little spot bursts forth with such savage lushness that walking through it one half expects to come face to face with a tiger.

I must explain the peculiar fact the spot I’m describing is neither large nor remote. In fact the deepest depths of the savage corner are maybe six feet from the house. It’s just that the lay of the house and plantings have created an isolated tiny wilderness. To get there from the front of the house, go past the dogwood on the front lawn, turn left at the tea roses that flourish despite my neglect of them, and then squeeze between the sycamore and the boxwoods. As you emerge from the shrubs, you’ll find yourself in a spot so overgrown with so many plants it takes your breath away. Ivy, Virginia creeper, and thorny things and wild weeds I can’t even identify. It’s as if the local flora developed a master plan for the neighborhood and zoned this petite square to return to nature. A couple of times per year I go back there and cut everything back, but for most of the summer it’s my own private little jungle.

Bike to/Walk home from Work Day

OK, I didn't bike to work on Bike to Work Day, but I had an excuse. Really. I biked to work on Tuesday, which was quite pleasant. I have finally settled on a favorite route and outside of some unpredictability due to construction in Tysons Corner (for example, about 50 feet of sidewalk disappeared between my morning and afternoon commutes), it's a pretty smooth ride.

Then came the ride home. I made it through the traffic of Tysons with few problems, then the bumpiness of Gallows Road. When I reached the bike trail that takes me the rest of the way home, I breathed a sigh of relief.

A little ways later I heard a sudden Bang, like a firecracker had gone off under my bike. I stopped immediately, and at first I thought it might have been a joke - maybe someone scattered those pressure-sensitive caps on the trail - since my front tire was fine. Then I realized my rear tire was massively blown.

Hmmm, four miles from home. No one to call. Got the bike with me, plus laptop and clothes. What to do? Wait? Walk? I wound up walking four miles home with the bike. Ow. To society's credit, I will say that two people did stop to offer help. Unfortunately, neither of them had a tube that would fit my bike.

So, my bike was out of commission for Bike to Work Day. Instead, I celebrated Buy New Super Durable Tires and Tubes So I Can Bike to Work in the Future Day.

Choppy Evening

A choppy evening on the Potomac tonight. There was a steady wind, creating a continuous wave train. The waves were only about a foot peak to trough. This is high enough to be fun, but not at all out of control. We banged our way South and around the bend into Washington Channel. Then we turned around and surfed the waves back.

Oh, how I have a love-hate relationship with surfing following waves. I hate the crazy out of control feeling of skidding as a wave picks up the back of the boat and makes it try to catch up with the front. Oh, how I love the feeling of riding a wave, paddling hard to keep on top of it, being propelled along faster and faster.

We got off the water just in time. As we were loading our gear it started to rain, and lightning arrived soon thereafter. Washington Summer is on its way.

Eat, Pray, Dub

When the opportunity to take a master class with Dubside came up, I jumped on it. What was he going to teach? What were the details? It didn't matter. Dubside is one of the masters of traditional Greenland-style kayaking, one of the few Americans to have competed in the Kayak Championship competitions in Greenland. I mean, you really should see this guy do a Kinnguffik paarlallugu/nerfallaallugu (Greenlandic for "coming up on the other side, on one's back"). Plus, he's a little bit of a character - kind of like a mystical shaman of the kayaking world. He has no fixed address. He dresses all in black. Even his kayak and kayaking gear are black. He has the kind of long, wild beard one would expect a mystic to have. He doesn't own a car and so paddles a folding kayak, which he schleps around on public transportation. And of course, he has only one name ... Dubside.

My kayaking pal Jen, who lives around the corner from me and I *for once* managed to coordinate car-pooling (we usually meet up at launch points and say "oh, we should have car-pooled"). We threw the boats on the car first thing in the morning and headed down to Mason Neck. We got there on time only to find most everyone else already there, so we hustled our gear down to the launch and hurried over to join the gang.

The day started with some talk about traditional kayaking and some stretches. In addition to the quirks already noted, it appears that Dubside has had his skeleton surgically removed, since he has some unbelievable flexibility. All thanks to yoga, he says. We all worked to emulate some bit of his flexibility, then we got on the water.

It was a pretty windy morning. There was significant chop in Belmont Bay, which meant we got a chance to practice under rough water conditions as we learned to fine tune our strokes and braces. I was a little dismayed to find my dry suit leaking a little at one wrist; this is something I'm going to have to investigate. I did my best to ignore the trickle of water slowly soaking my right arm and joined the group in surfing the waves back into Kane's Creek where it was calmer, but - as usual - quite shallow. Freshly armed with tips on how to add power to our stroke, we turned back into the wind and smashed through the waves back to the put-in. The strokes portion of the class filled the morning. By the time we got back to the put-in it was about noon, so we pulled the boats up on shore and took a lunch break on land.

During the break I had a chance to talk with a good friend who is back on the water after a nasty round of chemo. I admire this guy for maintaining a positive attitude through it all, and for his periodic - always upbeat - status emails through his ordeal. His emails never failed to inspire me to appreciate life a little bit more.

After lunch we focused on rolling. Unfortunately, the water level dropped dramatically during lunch break, almost as if someone had pulled the plug on Belmont Bay. I guess the tide combined with a shift in the winds accounted for this rapid drop. The net result was that the lower water level brought a bunch of weeds to the surface. You could paddle out past the weeds, but the wind would quickly blow you back. As a result, conditions weren't all that great and so I didn't do all that much rolling. I did a little practice using an Avataq (float) to get the feel of forward-finishing roll, but then I started to feel kinda wiped and so I headed back to the beach. A couple of other people headed in at about the same time. We chatted until the rest of the group came back in a little while later.

The class finished up back on land, with quick snippets of video from Greenland and some commando kayaking sea stories. Unfortunately, I had to bail because I knew I had to get home for Mother's Day dinner (Valerie is amazing to have let me go to this class on Mother's Day at all). So, I twisted Jen's arm a little to leave and we pointed the car northward towards home. And I made it back in time for dinner - barely.