Today I was slow to get going. My head hurt, but it being day 8 I refused to let a headache stop me. It just slowed me down a bit. So it was past lunch before getting started. I wanted DNJC in on this one. The day before he had expressed interest in seeing the Kinzua Viaduct State Park again. I figured we could kill two birds with one stone. We could see the park, and I could gain an extra set of eyes to help find the cache. Once he was up we checked for caches at the park. We did this by logging into http://www.geocaching.com/. There we found 2 caches. I only needed to do one but I loaded both onto my GPS. One of em was an AGT cache. David and I being curious as to what an AGT cache was we looked it up and found out it stands for Allegheny GeoTrail. The AGT caches each have a stamp in them. If you have a stamp book then you stamp it each time you find an AGT cache. If you get 3 AGT caches in a county then you get a coin. DNJC collects coins. I geocache every day. We decided to go get a passbook and start collecting coins. A beautiful marriage of effort. Unfortunately we can't get the pass book til tomorrow, so we had decided to do the "Nature Had Other Plans Cache." today and then the AGT cache tomorrow.
DNJC, Novalee, KC, and I drove the old van up to Kinzua State Park. It is a nice place. It is being fixed up pretty well. The park is where the famous Kinzua Viaduct had once spanned a great valley. It was an engineering marvel. Mother nature tore the span apart during a little wind storm a few years back. The ruins of the viaduct are amazing. Twisted metal towers line the valley floor. But what is more amazing is the Viaduct still stands tall and spans almost half the valley. Eventually the bridge will be fortified and there will be viewing platform at the wrecked bridges end. This will be three shades of awesome. To be able to walk so high up and over the valley until you get to where the bridge was torn asunder by the mad winds of the Kinzua Valley. Then to look out over the rest of the valley. Seeming suspended 200 feet in the air. Mmm very exciting. We came here to see if it seemed that they were close to finishing. David was told before summer began that the park would be finished by the fall. Either they are behind schedule or the ranger meant the project would be done in the fall of 2011. We decided to check out the cache, before the bridge. Eventually we made it to the General Kane trail which the cache was on. We unleashed KC. He sprinted back and fourth relishing in his freedom. Novalee sang some tuneless melodies. I heard "dog" in there and "love." To quote a line in Toy Story II, "She's and artist". The GPS did its count down as we approached the cache. Then when we were very close. We began hunting for the hiding place. We searched, and we searched, but nothing. David and I look at the cache description in the GPS. Then hunted again, and nothing. We tramped through prickers flipped over stumps, and looked under rocks, and nothing. Our hands all pricked up we looked at the comments that other geocachers left. Turns out the coordinates on groundspeak are off, no problem. We imputed the new coordinates.... Nothing. We read more comments. The cache is 80 feet away from the coordinates. We go 80 feet in either direction from the cache and nothing. Eventually Novalee would have to answer natures call. I helped her with that and we looked some more. KC wore himself down and still we hunted. The sun came out then was covered by clouds again. Soon it would be time to go home and make dinner, so we relented. I still needed a cache today though so we decided to look for the AGT cache after all. We found the AGT cache near where we parked the van. We logged our visit then went down to enjoy the great view this park offers.
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