International Earthcache Day Celebration on Deep River, central North Carolina

 The second weekend back in the USA (14 October) proved to be as much of a geocaching adventure as the first (last week's report on caching and camping in the Uwharrie National Forest). Soon after arriving in North Carolina I received Groundspeak's weekly notification and saw a geocaching event only 16 miles from home. I looked it up and saw that the theme was one that interests me - Earthcaching -- and that the host was someone I'd met in December hosting a Christmas event near my home. I had to participate. 

markcase teaching a geology class

sumajhuarmi preparing an avatar

Deep River

sumajman, MasterYoda1 and sumajhuarmi on Deep River

On Sunday morning we had our picnic cooler packed, our change of clothes neatly hidden away in the car and our Bibles with us as we headed out to church. We attended the Baptist hispanic church in Greensboro, NC. It is called La Iglesia Internacional and it is where two of our three daughters attend along with their families. We had a great time seeing old friends we've not seen for a while and making some new friends. After church service there is the usual conversation outside the building. This time we had another mission. We had to get in the car and hit the road for Randleman, NC and more specifically, for the Deep River Park where the event was to be sponsored. On the way we picked up a few caches. Upon arrival at Earthcache Day! (GC3XJBH) we did all the preliminary things such as signing the log, registering for prizes to be given away in the drawings, and making our little avatars to be placed at what we each believed to be ground zero for the event. We then broke out the food and began to share with the rest of the geocaching community. I learned that we were one of less than 20 such events worldwide on this day. That made us rather special I thought. Our host markcase challenged us with some great lessons on local Piedmont geology. He explained how the Deep River came to be 10,000 years ago and how the worm holes formed in one of the large rock formations in the river nearby. It was very interesting. My grandson, MasterYoda!, was really tuned in to all that he said. Then we played our games. None of our ground zero avatars was close enough to win. When it came time for the prize drawings both MasterYoda 1 and sumajhuarmi (my loving wife) won prizes. They were content. One of the blessings of the day was getting to meet up with some old friends. In this case we introduced them to geocaching some years back. See the blog entry for 9 August 2009 related to that funny experience. We also made some new friends who came from the surrounding area. We had a blast! I really appreciated several things about this event: 1) The host was sensitive to the fact that a number of the likely participants would want to go to worship service in the morning so he hosted the event in the early afternoon. 2) The time he took to prepare to teach the geology lessons. 3) The new earthcache that we all got to partinicpate in giving birth. That's right. As we walked along Deep River markcase pointed out some interesting geological facts. We decided which of them we would turn into a new earthcache. Keep an eye out for the new earthcache in Randleman, NC. When the event ended we headed out to pick up a few more caches around the area. We must admit that we had several DNFs. It seemed that two well-known geocachers in the area had hidden some difficult caches with names like Tadabailey's Revenge (GC14AWB) and so forth.Clearly Tadabailey was striking back at another cacher for a particularly difficult cache. We rounded out the situation by DNFing both caches. Maybe someday we'll find them. It was a great way to spend the day! I hope your Sunday afternoon was exciting as mine was!