It was a very cold night to be out, and with my dad just getting over being sick, I did not think he needed to be getting out of the truck. So, I told him to stay back and I would go and get the cache. We were out Geocaching.

What is Geocaching? Well, I have heard it explained in different ways, the funniest being, “using the government’s multi-million dollar satellite system to traipse through the woods using a GPS to find Tupperware containers”. Or modern day treasure hunting.  It is a hobby that I have picked up and gotten my dad into as well. 

Back to the story. As I plugged in the coordinates to the cache “On Top Of Old Smokey” and started into the woods, I quickly realized that I was going to have to move faster than I had thought because it was getting dark. The trail was rough and straight down. With a few switchbacks here and there and here and there – now that I think about it there were a lot of them. I would periodically take a look at the GPS to see if I was getting close and, of course, it seemed as if it was taking forever. But as you know, when you do not really know where you are going it feels like a long time.  I probably was only gone from the truck for about 5 to 10 minutes. I went on into the woods when finally the alarm on my GPS went off telling me that I had arrived at the Cache site.

I stopped to catch my breath and removed my toboggan from my ears. I was hot. I had no sooner stopped to let the GPS settle in good on my location and let my ears cool off, when I heard something behind me.

(to be continued…)