Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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Here be dragons

There is a geocache up on the mountain that is just a tad difficult to get to, located, as it is, in a cave halfway down a sandstone cliff. Although someone with some rockclimbing skill could manage it without any special equipment (and there are a few notorious amusing stories about people contriving to get ladders to the location!), it was not the sort of cache I was likely to be able to find on my own.

So, when I heard that a cacher named Swampy* was prepared to help a group do some abseiling to get to “The Dragon’s Lair”, I thought “I’ll be in that”. Thus it was that one fine Saturday morning I found myself about to cycle along part of the Pipeline Track with a few fellow adventurers, including Gorbak* with whom I have cached on at least one other occasion. Gorbak and I decided to find a few caches on the way in to the Lair (there is a whole trail of caches along this route, just for fun), and then we skipped a bunch in order to get to the Lair on time.

Here we met up with the rest of the amateur and professional dragonologists, got ourselves dressed in the appropriate attire for bearding dragons in their lairs, and received the necessary instructions in the art of dragon hunting at the end of a piece of string. Then it was time to wait patiently for my turn to step into the void. After leaning back and cautiously easing my way over the edge and down the cliff-face, I found myself dangling in the den of the dragon. OldSaint* helped with the landing, and then it was time to search in all the wrong places for the cache that was actually clearly visible from where I was standing (my cache-hunting works that way sometimes!). I wrote some comments in the logbook that I hope were both legible and intelligible. I don’t THINK my hands were shaking, but I was trying to write while also holding conversations with various people such as the chief dragonologist (Swampy), the brake/belayer (TimTamToo*), the photographer (Dippy*) and the guardian of the lair (OldSaint), which may explain why there may be some doubt about the quality of the written log. I think this also explains why Gorbak, who came down after me, had to actually sign my name in the logbook because I had forgotten to do that bit! Inexplicably, on leaving the lair, I didn’t go over its edge quite as smoothly as I wanted, and I still can’t work out why this one was awkward (well, apart from the tree in the way!). All in all, I guess it was about a 15m drop from top to bottom, with the cave slightly over half-way down (I find it really hard to estimate heights, and 15m doesn’t seem very much … but it is about 5 storeys).

Once everyone had had their turn, we started making our way back. This time there was a larger group on bikes and we had an entertaining time finding the remaining caches on the Pipeline Track power trail: perhaps you can imagine a group of cyclists converging on one geographical spot trying to be the first to spot where a tiny cache was hidden in the bush. At one spot, we were temporarily bamboozled … and so was RebornCyclist* who was actually the person who had hidden it. There was an enjoyable sense of camaraderie and fun that added to the success of the whole day.

All in all, it was a really enjoyable day: good company, a bit of an adrenaline rush, lovely bush, some exercise, pushing the edge of my comfort zone (I wasn’t totally relaxed about going over the edge!), and a few smileys for the cache tally. 🙂

Thanks to Dippy for the photographs.

* Not their real names

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