My First Cache Hide

We had a beautiful Christmas day here with a high in the upper fifties. Quite a turn around from yesterdays cold rain. I decided to take advantage of it and place my first cache. As was pointed out in an earlier post, my plan was thrown a curve ball by two new caches that were placed in the park I intended to place my cache. The rule is that no two caches can be closer than one tenth of a mile apart. The good news is that it is a big park :) My fears were for naught. I was able to place my cache where I had intended to place it and was still .2 miles from Parkwest Rocky Trail and .3 miles from Parkwest Nature Trail. I hiked into my location from the park. The descent from the park was pretty steep and rocky. Geocachers will need to be careful if the rocks are wet. Once I got past the descent it was relatively flat, but heavily wooded. Fortunately, there is something there that resembles a trail. I assume it is used by people that fish in Polecat Creek. After some hiking and bushwacking, I found a nice spot to place my cache. It had a nice view of Polecat Creek and somewhat of a tree-free sky view. That will help with GPS reception. As you can tell from the photo taken about 20 foot from the cache, the view is pretty nice. My hopes are to take people to views that they haven't seen before. After I got the cache situated, I created a waypoint using the averaging function of my GPS. The GPS collected about 500 readings over 5 minutes and averaged them. The coordinates should be pretty accurate. I hiked back out and headed home. I did make one stop to see if I could be the first to find Parkwest Rocky Trail. I hunted for it about 30 minutes but was unable to find the cache. From the cache description, I wasn't real sure exactly what I was looking for anyways. It must have been well hidden, well camoed, or my eyes are just getting old. I logged it as a DNF on Geocaching.com. I'm going to get out and do some cache hunting tomorrow since Monday is our "observed" holiday at work. I'm kinda on the tail end of a chest cold and didn't feel up to much today. My real goal was to get my new cache out and I accomplished that. It has been submitted to GC.com and hopefully it will get approved soon !

I hope everyone had a wonderful and safe holiday !