horton grove cache-o

What: an orienteering course with 23 geocaches for controls. 

Where: Horton Grove Nature Preserve, Bahama, NC.

Who: open to anyone. Report shared below.

Why: reconnect with and refine your intrinsic geo-senses! This is one of three local courses set up to practice and prepare for BHC unplugged part 2. See also CCMNA and CNF.

When: Go when you please. Horton Grove is open from dawn until dusk year-round. Although this course is about half the length of the others, it still has about the same number of caches to find. In other words, not necessarily cleared in half the time!

How: ditch the device, use this printed map (8.5x11 at 1:7500 with 100m UTM grid). 

You will also want to print this PDF (8.5x11), which gives UTM coordinates, descriptions and hints for the geocaches. It also gives the dates "last found" current to when this list was compiled. You may want to follow the hyperlinks to check recent status. You can now free yourself from the screen and begin plotting locations of the caches by hand on the map. Next, venture out by foot to find them! 

Be respectful, travel without a trace and re-hide caches. Notify cache owners of any issues. Please consider posting your results/experience in a comment below.

1/24: I got out before a winter storm with just map and compass and came up short of clearing the course. I found 21 of 23 caches in just under 4 hours and 7.5 miles! This underscores what an absolute time suck searching within ground zeroes can be and why I disagree with Carl's assessment of BHC.

I botched coordinates on one of the early caches and found myself 100 meters too far south when I re-plotted in the field. After that, all plots were suspect! One of the DNFs was kind of expected. The other gobbled up another 30 minutes. When everything began looking like a "weird tree base," I gave up. 

My fondest moment was finding one of SubtleBear's caches. The map is great (many thanks, Dave!), but this one is an outlier in uncharted dense vegetation and requires finesse. Although I avoided precipitation, the freezing temperatures with the stop and go made it a challenge for staying warm.