Old Fence Post

Geocaching has been around since 2000 and we have been caching since 2003. During that first year we made some beginners' mistakes. The worst, of course, was my husband breaking his leg, but there were other less drastic and more amusing errors on our part. Like the day we decided to try for the "Old Fence Post" cache.

This cache was in downtown Kent, but that didn't stop it from being in a wild area. We found a parking place as near to the cache as we could get, but still nearly half a mile away. We found what looked like a small path and headed out toward the cache. In less than a minute the path petered out. In another minute we were in swamp water up to our knees. Did we turn back? Of course not, we were already wet, we might as well continue on.

We sloshed through half a mile of wetlands before we got to a dry patch that had an old post in the ground. The Old Fence Post. The cache was under a rock at the base of the post.  As my husband was signing the log and my 10 year old son was going through the cache to see if there was anything he wanted to trade for, I was looking around.

I noticed a group of people walking along and talking about a hundred feet from where we were standing. Suspicious, I started walking over the completely dry section of land to where I had seen the people. There was a nicely paved path leading back in the direction of our car. We looked at each other and down at our sopping wet clothes and shoes and groaned. Then we laughed. We followed the path back and it came out about a hundred feet from our car. It was on the other side of a building which is why we hadn't noticed it before.


It wasn't the end of our caching for the day, but we did go home and change our clothes before we headed back out. After that we paid more attention to the terrain rating. There's a terrain rating on every cache, 1-5 stars. One star means wheel chair accessible, five stars means you need special equipment, like a boat or climbing gear. This cache was rated 1.5 stars, we should have known there was a way in that didn't include wading through a swamp.

Now we just have to go get the "The Bloated Festering Head of my First Victim". That one's a terrain 4, there is no way in except through the swamp.