Caches, Waymarks, & Challenges (Oh My!)

Since logging my 100th find a few weeks ago I've found about a dozen more caches and yesterday I was able fit in a few more.

On my last post I said that I had found my largest cache container yet and possibly ever.  Well I was wrong.  Two weeks ago I had some time to kill before the appointment at the garage for my cars scheduled maintenance so I decided to grab a nearby cache that was on my to do list.  It wound up being a shed in someone's backyard (yes a shed!).  There is even a wooden trunk dedicated to travel bugs and signature items.  After a few minutes of letting me discover the bountiful cache one of the people who lived there came out and we talked for a bit before i had to leave.  I even got a container I plan to use for a new hide.  Saweeet!

Well a few days ago Geocaching.com sent out an email to members saying that they are discontinuing Challenges.  Challenges had been their answer to replacing virtual caches where instead of going somewhere to sign a logbook you are 'challenged' to go somewhere and DO something.  I had accepted a few challenges since signing up for geocaching.com but had never actually done one.

When I had to go to a nearby town for work yesterday I decided to leave a little bit early and do some caches over my lunch hour beforehand.  The cool part was that one the caches I had picked was also the site of a waymark AND challenge.  w00t w00t!  Now I can kill THREE birds with one stone.  Well, technically log three different finds with one smartphone and one location.  But who is splitting hairs? (you'll get that joke later on).

The cache is near the site of a mill 125 years ago.  The miller decided it was a shame to waste the energy of the water flowing out of the mills turbine.  So downstream he built a tower where water twisted the turbine under the tower, a series of gears and shafts spun a large sheave [shEEv] near the peaked roof. Like a giant laundry line with a cable looped around two wheels, water power was transferred from the small tower to the main mill.  What makes this site even MORE unique is that it's one of the only surviving examples of auxiliary water power still standing.  Now that's a cool waymark!

I think the creator of the challenge thought it was pronounced [shAve] instead of [shEEv] because the challenge read:

Stand in front of the Tower and take a picture of you cutting someone's hair with either clippers or scissors and then upload the picture.  No need to actually fully shave, but would be a bonus for sure!

Well I didn't have someone else or scissors with me.  So, not to split hairs (get it now?) I just took a picture of myself pretending to cut my hair with my fingers.

The cache itself was about 40 ft downstream.  I had a bit of a tumble on the way there due to frozen moss on the path (note to self... frozen moss is S-L-I-P-P-E-R-Y).  But it was well worth it for a find at this kind of location.  I dropped one of my signature items, signed the log, took some pictures of the tower for the logs and went on my way.

The rest of the day was a couple simple caches (an LPC) and a DNF on the final of a multi (the way to find the coords for the final was well done).  All in all it was a good day of caching.  I'll leave you with a few more pictures of the tower and a short (I mean SHORT) video of the water running under the bridge.