Out on another Saturday adventure, Karen and I went geocaching in Nichols Arboretum. Geocachers in the Ann Arbor area should probably read no further, as this entry will give some stuff away

The cache, called "My Old School," was hidden about a half mile in the Arb and the posting suggested it would take about an hour round trip. Most of our walking was done on these narrow secondary trails.

On the way we saw two patches of trilium, which is an illegal flower to pick.

Later in this entry, I've posted a topographic map of the area and you'll be able to see just how hilly this area is. From the lowest point we traveled and the highest point, there was about an 80ft height difference
And the terrain went up and down the whole way there.

The GPS unit doesn't give you a map to where you're going, only an arrow that points which way it is. When we were about .17 miles away from the cache (we started at about .68) we stumbled out of the arb and into a neighborhood: something you don't really expect when tromping through the woods.


We started walking up the street. This big house was going up on one side of the street.

And this green-roof house was on the other side.

We got as close as .07 miles away before we realized we weren't going to be able to get through the neighborhoods, so we had to backtrack to a crossroad and take a different way.

I overlayed the path we ended up taking to the cache onto a photo of a topographic map on a sign at the entrance (bottom left). It looks pretty easy when you view it from above with the route we took drawn on it, but isn't the same when you're actually on the ground.

As we got closer to the cache, we ran into a bunch of these tepee-like structures that someone made
I used the timer to get a shot of me and Karen in the biggest tepee.

The tree cover made it tough to get a good satellite signal, but Karen found the .50 cal ammo container cache after not too long after we were within 40ft of it


One of the first log entries in the cache: 12-9-2001

The cache had a bunch of random contents (in bag in bottom right corner) in it including some hot wheels cars, a toy lizard, a frog, soap, stickers, a shoehorn, and quite a few other objects

Sig cards of some of the other people that had been there before us.

We took this frog and sig card and left a container of bubbles and a sig card that we drew up on some cardstock
On the way out we decided to try and find out way out without the GPS. We walked West a ways until we got into the main valley area. Every year, people plant a line of daffodils that goes all the way through the arb. We found where the line ended.
Once we found that we just followed it out.


On the way out we got to see a good deal of the daffodil line, parts of a place where Karen did "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Arb, and this squirrel carved out of a tree stump.

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