Geocaching and The Sweethearts14 puzzles

 Good morning everyone.  Today we look at Kentucky for the oldest, most favorite and most logged found.  The oldest, most favorite, and second most found geocache is 'Tom Sawyer'  GC39E.  Hidden in March, 2001, it has been found 2,558 times and has accumulated 679 favorite points to date.  The cache with the most logged finds is 'Newport KY World Peace Bell Virtual'  GC653C.  Placed in June, 2002, this virtual has 2,867 finds and 516 favorite points.

I'm going to take a break from featuring Adventure Labs for the moment.  That doesn't mean I haven't done any lately.  Au contraire.  I have at least four completed recently, not to mention a couple of others that I did but didn't take pictures at the time.  I want to retrace those ones and grab some pictures.  Today I want to talk about a different adventure I did recently.

I was playing around with my stats page, looking at the fizzy grid and days found calendar.  One of my new longer term goals is to fill my days found calendar with mystery caches.  Yes, my overall days found was completed a number of years ago, but I broke that down to cache types.  Much to my surprise, I have over 200 days filled already with mystery caches.  Time to get back to solving puzzles.  There was a group of puzzle caches that I started to solve last fall.  I was successful in solving a couple, but I never returned to finish them all.  Back to the drawing board with those ones.

These puzzle caches are the product of local geocachers Sweethearts14.  They are a married couple that took the local geocaching community by storm a few years ago.  I was the stats guy for the local geocaching community when I saw the name Sweethearts14 pop up and they were finding crazy amounts of geocaches.  Since then, they started to hide their own.  They also got their hands on a puzzle solving book and began creating puzzle caches.  Some are easy, and some are not.  I will say this, they are awesome cache owners.  If you are stuck with any of their geocaches, puzzle or traditional, they will answer you with helpful hints.  Certitude style puzzles seem to be their favorite (my least favorite as I can't seem to wrap my brain around this type of puzzle), but they do come up with plenty of different ways of creating a puzzle cache.  My favorite are the jigsaw puzzles.  You are provided a link to a puzzle site, put the puzzle together (it could be large and few pieces to smaller and lots of pieces) and when complete, you get the solved coordinates.

(One of their puzzle caches that I did complete, just need to find it)

I was able to solve five of their puzzles.  My advice when doing puzzle caches, don't do them when you're tired and your eyes are going wonky.  That was the case with one of the puzzles.  The answer was right in front of my eyes and I couldn't see it.  It was one of the Sweethearts that pointed out what was no longer obvious to me.  Now I'm ready to go find some caches.  The original plan was to grab all five in one day.  When I saw my date found mystery calendar, I decided to spread out the finds on days I needed a mystery find.

First up was one that I had heard about from Hakliva while we were guests on Adventures with Dan's podcast.  It's a tree climb, but this tree was an easy climb, even for myself.  The best way to describe it is the branches are low enough that it acts like a staircase to the geocache.  I generally stay away from tree climbs unless I'm confident enough to climb and return to the ground without falling.

(It's up that tree)

I set out on different days and found the remaining caches.  Two were fairly easy finds, one was tricky, and one was an adventure of it's own.

(The opposite of a tree climb)

I forgot to take a picture of the cache, but I did catch the sunset.  

I didn't feel like going back to get a picture of the container.

This would have taken much longer than it did.  I was lucky to spot a possible geo-trail and focused on that area.  It was by chance that I discovered this one as quickly as I did.

The final one that I found was fairly straightforward.  A container in a bush on the side of the road.  This is where my adventure begins.  I forgot my boots at home on this day.  I wasn't going to let that stop me.  I had suspected that there might be a ditch to cross to get to the container.  I was right.  The question is, how hard is the snow in the ditch and how deep is it?  If it gets cold enough, the snow will become hard enough to walk across without sinking.  Off I go.  A few steps in, sank a little, but not bad.  I slowly navigate across, getting closer one step at a time.  Almost there.  I sunk into the snow.  Found the container, signed and replaced.  I did my best to retrace my steps back to my car.

(I was up to my thighs in snow with no boots, just my runners)

I have plenty more puzzles solved but yet to find from the Sweethearts14.  With this batch, I was able to fill three more days on my mystery day found calendar.

That's it for this week.  Next week I announce the winner of the January photo contest.  If you haven't entered yet, you have until January 29th to get your pictures in.  You can send your entries in to thegeocachingguild@gmail.com  Who will win?  Will it be you?  Until then, be happy, stay safe, wash your hands and wear a mask, hug your furry critters, and most importantly, have fun.  Peace out.

(All nestled in my arms while I try to schedule blog posts to The Geocaching Guild)

(Getting ready to pounce.  Either on her sister or one of the unsuspecting dogs)