SlimCache

I've been feeling pretty rotten taking so much downtime. I haven't done much caching recently and was really ready to get back out into the woods. Today after work I made it over to a series of trails linked together in North Yarmouth. Sadly I ended up finding what felt like a small fraction of what I was looking for.

Here's the list of caches in the sequence attempted:
NY Town Forest Micro - GC1CRP5
NY Town Forest Mystery Cache - GC1CQT0 DNF
North Yarmouth Veterans Memorial Park - GCW10N DNF
Ristich Nature Trail Multi - GC135CP DNF
NY Town Forest Loop Macro Multi - GC1CXDT
Town Forest Loop Micro - GC135CC DNF

Ugh. That's only a 33% success rate. It wasn't really for the finds today though. I was looking for a good walk and I found one. I ended up doing about 4 miles at an average of 3.2 mph, and I was very impressed with the trails I visited.

First spot of note was the Sam Ristich Nature Trail, so named after a wild mushroom expert from the area. It was actually one of the things that most intrigued me as I walked through the area. After reading this Boston Globe article on Ristich, I learned that I was out here at the optimal time for the mushroom season. Also from the same article :

"Affectionately nicknamed the ''Mushroom Guru" (or sometimes the ''Guru of Sligo Road," after the street on which he lives), Ristich has achieved ''mycogod status" among an elite subgroup of hard-core mushroom aficionados."

From there it was on to the North Yarmouth Town Forest Loop with an abundance of fungi and today, an even larger abundance of frustration, exhaustion, and resignation. I'm not especially great with micro caches in the woods. That's not to say that I don't like the hunt, but today the cloud cover and the trees led to a really improper signal to my GPSr. One second I would be 0 feet from the cache site, and then somehow without moving I was magically 40 feet in the wrong direction according to my unit. All in all it was a completely enjoyable day. Don't let the DNFs get you down. It's about the journey not the destination.

I also recorded some vital stats from the day. My average heart rate was 129 BPM and a maximum rate of 159 bpm was reached as I even spent a little time jogging between cache sites. I burned a whopping 1234 kcals in just about 2.5 hours and 55% of that were fat cals. A fiercely rewarding day and a great burn achieved. I sure did miss the trails. I'm glad to be back.