Goin Nuts! -- one really frustrating four star cache

SPOILER ALERT for Piedmont North Carolina ---

sumajhuarmi asked me to drop her off at church to work in a yard sale benefit Saturday morning early. I

The Guilford Woods

decided that would be a good opportunity to go caching in the area near the church. I hit all the typically muggle-intense geocaches in the nearby shopping center before the crowds started their rounds. Most were easy; many being LPCs (Lamp Post Caches). One took me behind one small shopping center. It was a pretty easy cache. I parked in front of the State Farm store and made my way back to the back of shopping center. Fortunately there was a gate leading right back to the area of interest. I crossed the small  paved area and was glad to see that this one was going to take me into the woods and not present me with another lamp post. Just as soon as I got into the woods a van pulled up and out jumped two muggle workers. I don't know what store they worked in but they seemed to have been assigned the task of delivering something. Instead of getting

Goin' Nuts was in a small LnL container, guess where?

about their business, they started walking around the parking lot and talking on their cell phones loudly. I knew that if I moved around in the woods they'd hear me so I decided to wait them out. Minutes turned to many minutes and it didn't look like I was going to be able to get to this cache (or anywhere for that matter) with out arousing some suspicion. Finally a truck with no muffler pulled into the parking lot to drop off some trash. I'm sure he wasn't supposed to do this but I was grateful. I took advantage of his noise to move deeper into the woods and get to the cache location. I found it quickly and then found an alternate route out of the woods and to my car. I guess this is part of the adventure that is geocaching.

The culprit: Nut Case

I picked up a few more caches and then went for the big challenge of the day. Goin' Nuts! (GC2GHBJ) by Sketcher1, a local geocacher rapidly gaining some notoriety for his evil caches, was waiting for me about a ten minute hike into the Guilford College woods. These woods are owned by Guilford College but have some nice unimproved walking trails. College students and neighbors frequently run or walk the trails. I tracked to where my GPSr led me and soon found myself just off the trail and across a small creek. I was within sight of the trail anyone who might come down it. The cache page stated that this micro size find was a four-star-difficulty cache. It also had me thinking, due to the title of the cache, that it must be one of those micro/nano containers implanted in a hickory nut or something. The cache page asked cachers not

Success after acquiring the knowledge

to do a ground clearing as it would possibly ruin the hide. I found myself in the woods with all the ground cover (winter leaves, twigs, roots, several small fallen trees looking for some kind of micro. There were no sign of nut bearing trees nor nuts littering the ground. I first looked to see if there were any geo-trails or signs of geocachers looking around. The last time this cache had been found was a month ago. There wasn't a lot of disturbance on the ground but some sign that some leaves had been swept aside near a couple of the fallen trees. Where could this micro be? What could this micro be? I noticed a small fallen evergreen about 15 feet from my ground zero but nothing unusual really. I spent about ten minutes looking around but really had no clues to go on. I went back to the fall evergreen to see a small opening in the exposed roots. I checked it out and came out with a small tupperware container. Sure enough, I had the cache. Inside the container I found a

bulky object wrapped in bubble wrap. What could it be? I unbound the object to find something I'd never seen before. I knew right away that it was some kind of a puzzle toy designed to test both wit and patience. I found a nice soft place on the ground with my back to the fallen evergreen and began to examine the object. A picture better explains it so see  the picture. As you can see it looks like two bolts attached together with two nuts on the bolts. There's no way to get the nuts off the bolts. There were holes in either bolt head and I could see the small nano cache log container inside. At first I tried getting the log container to line up with the hole. I used my tweezers. That didn't work. The log container was too big for the hole. As I examined further I saw that there was some movement, some play along the shaft of the bolt. This convinced me that there was a certain position that I had to put the two nuts in so that it would open for me. The two bolt heads were firmly attached, then only play was in the bolt shaft which was hollow inside and spliced together. The two nuts were inscribed with the words "nut" on one, and "case" on the other. For the next 45 minutes I tried every combination I could think of. Nothing worked. I knew that I was missing something. I began to think how much I hated these kinds of caches where once you find it you can't get at the log sheet. I even though that I'd just take the cache container home with me and find a way to open it. I have some tools in the garage and if I had it there I could get into this thing. That was all frustration speaking and not reason. So I did the right think and I flung the cache as deep into the woods as I could through it....well, no I didn't. I was that frustrated but I controlled my frustration, returned the cache to the small tupperware container, placed it back in its hiding place and began my trek to the next cache down the line.

When I got home with sumajhuarmi I started logging my finds. I got to this one but wasn't going to log a DNF. No way, "I'm getting into this one and I'm going back", I said. My son-in-law came by. I asked Check it out. That was it. Instructions to opening this contraption.

sumajhuarmi put it back together again

him if he had ever heard of such as thing as the nut case. He had not. I then googled it. Can you do that on a Bing search engine? Maybe I "binged" it. The first think that binged was a youtube video.

Come Wednesday night we left for church early. I planned about 15 minutes to make the find. I cut it a little tight as opening the nut case took a little longer than I thought. I was about to give up and take the nut with me to have more time to play with it when it suddenly opened up for me. We signed the log. Then sumajhuarmi fiddled with it to get it back together. That was almost as much a chore as opening was. We got it done, crossed the creek and made it to prayer meeting on time. I'm glad to have this one on my "found" list.