Wow. Closest dashpoint ever -only 12 km from my house in an old section of Naperville, IL. I went to the grocery store and the office supply store and hit a dashpoint. My mother-in-law wanted to tag along to the grocery store, so I said she was "in for a treat." The dashpoint was in the middle of a private property retention pond, about 100 feet in diameter, and we drove the entire perimeter - never getting out of the car - but getting well within the 100 meter limit. The closest point was 22 meters when we were directly south of the point.
My mother-in-law, who barely understands the thrill of Geocaching, was not impressed with Geodashing. What's supposed to be there? Nothing mom - just a random point on an interesting planet. Thank God it wasn't a cornfield. I never would have heard the end of it.
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The text that I used on Geodashing best describe this point, so I'll just quote it here.
Dashpoint Reached: GD6-03903
Dateline: 41.7605, -88.8696
Description: Shabbona Lake State Park, Central Illinois (Northern), USA
A dreary 51°F, but that puts me above my tolerance for hiking in the wilderness. A cache and a dash were calling, both in relative proximity of home. I live extremely close to U.S. 30, one of the original East-West roads across the U.S., originally called the Lincoln Highway (in fact, my hometown boasts that it is the intersection of the Lincoln Highway and the old Route 66). To get to this dashpoint, I headed straight out US30 for about 22 miles due west. One son (the 2yo) was sawing logs before we got 5 miles from home, while the older one and I listened to our best Christmas CDs and watched the prairies and farm fields roll by. Travelling through the smallest towns I've seen in a while (Big Tock, Hinckley, etc.), I started making mental notes of the "claim to fame" for some of these towns. Hinckley, for example, claims on their signs that in 1927, they hosted the very first basketball game of the Harlem Globetrotters. Interesting.
Shabbona Lake State Park rests on the south side of Shabbona, Illinois. The town itself is a trip to rural America circa 1960. No fast food restaurants, and the only increeping of modern industrial America is that the local Amoco is changing to BP (as they all are). It is a very quaint little rural town, with the prerequisite Grain Elevator (Shabbona Grain Company).
The actual dashpoint (terraserver picture at link at bottom) is just within the front entrance to the state park. In fact, getting within scoring range just means driving the E-W road past the park. Once I pulled in, I hopped out of the car and went the 20 meters east to the zero mark, placed my GPS down and snapped a photo. I also took several pictures of the zero mark, which rested on a little burm right to the north of a pine tree. I did get a chance to scope out the rest of the park, which is a heavy fishing area - the self-proclaimed Muskee Capital of Illinois. We were lucky enough to give my sons an education on boat launching while observing the actual process.
Afterwards, it was a 17 mile drive to the nearest Burger King for the boys before we tackled Kendall's Highpoint (GC2A2C) and called it a day. A great day for all, with the wife still recouperating at home.
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 Composite shot
A very nice cache indeed. When I placed Hall of Justice (GC27B6) only 4 miles from here, I saw this forest preserve and made a mental reference that this might be a great spot for a cache. How right I was.
We found the cache by parking within 500 feet of the cache itself, but had to bushwack straight through the forest the last 450 feet. Once the GPS zeroed out, I found myself in a quandary with two possible hiding spots. The first one was an old tree that had died so many years ago there was no bark on the sides, and the root system was mostly exposed. The tree was still at a 75° angle because the top boughs had rested into the crook of another neighboring tree's boughs. I poked for quite a while underneath that root system. After thinking the cache might have been plundered, I took another look at my GPS and my son's compass. Apparently, I had approached the 75° angle tree a little too quickly, and the GPS hadn't settled down - as it now read that I was about 30 feet from the cache. A quick look around the area lead me right to the hiding spot, but it took another 5 minutes of looking to find it.
As a side note, when I was much younger (I think I must have been 8 or 9 when that happened, 1975-76), my sister was the first female Cross Country runner for Plainfield. I remember coming to a race where my mom kept score, and we came to this park. Part of the final portion of the race (after running 1.25 miles already) was to run the very last portion of the race up the tall hill on one side and then down the other to approach the finish line. What a great memory triggered by a cache.!
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Hard as Pi Cache Maintenance
Date of Fixing: 12/22/2001
Fixer: Kelly
I got two notes in the period of two days that really caused some problems. First, I got a discouraging note from BornToHike indicating that he had indeed found the third marker after much headaches (heheheh), and done the math, only to find the last location plundered. Dang - I thought I had hidden it so well!
The second note was that Alan of Team CacheCows of Wisconsin had some time off coming up and would be traveling the 100+ miles to hit Hard as Pi. Dang! Now I needed to fix this cache in a hurry. |  |
I had also berated myself for not having done a better job of averaging the coordinates for the third stage marker, as many of the seekers had significant problems in finding this deviously placed marker. So, I decided I needed to do a specific course of events:
- Get revised coordinates for stage 3.
- Get a new "booty box" for the last stage, including newly stocked items, a new log book, etc.
- Recover any stray materials and the original booty box location.
- Place the new booty box and take the new readings.
- Head back to the computer and average all of the new readings.
- Reverse calculate the math for stage 4
- Reverse calculate the math for stage 3
- Place the revised instructions in the stage 2 marker (and do a site check)
- Place the revised instructions in the stage 3 marker
Busy day, but Sherry authorized a morning of a babysitter to sit around the house in case little Sammy needed picking up (which she can't do while recovering from surgery). I started at 9:00 a.m.
I found the original booty box sitting in a much plainer view of from the trail than there was when I had to fight the foliage of June. No wonder it was plundered. I looked around in the immediate area to see if I could just move it to a better zone, but no such luck. I trudged the length of the park looking for the right location - and found a large dog skeleton in a prairie field (cool) and eventually found a perfect hiding spot. Fourth item on my list took a lot longer than I expected.
Having gotten new readings for stage 3 during the week, I went back to my computer quickly and did the math, taking about 45 minutes for calculations, averaging and reprinting. I then went back out to stage 2 to replace the new instructions and ran into my biggest SNAFU - the marker was in more "plain sight" than the final booty box had been. I let the GPS zero out and decided to find a good spot where my GPS told me to plant it - and found an ingenious spot - one that will make Geocachers curse me for years to come!
Having place the second marker with new instructions and a new (better) location, I decided that the third marker could wait, as we needed to run some errands in the afternoon. Later that night, we returned to fix the third marker, and I now know that I'll have to put a "trecherous terrain" warning on the page for icy conditions. It could be VERY dangerous.
Bottom line, it's all fixed and I'm ready for Alan and Team CacheCows' visit in January or February.
The text that I used on Geodashing best describe this point, so I'll just quote it here.
Dashpoint Reached: GD6-03986
Description: West-Northwest Chicago Suburbs, Illinois, USA
Dash Trip Name: The First Day After Christmas
While the dashpoint itself was pretty uneventful, the trip to the dashpoint brought back many memories, as well as some poignent locations to those unfamiliar with Chicago's suburban layout.
The first prominent feature was a "known hazard" while attempting this cache on December 26. The Interstate access to the main off-road is an intersection that allows the only Interstate access to the nation's largest indoor mall (in number of stores - and yes, it's got more than Mall of America): Woodfield Shopping Center in Shaumburg. Woodfield has become notorious in Chicagoland as the place to avoid at all costs from two days before Thanksgiving (late November) to at least January 2. Fortunately, the resulting traffic made an immediate left turn on the exit ramp, as I continued on to the frontage road for about a mile north of the mall.
Just turning east on to Golf Road (IL-58) I noticed the corporate headquarters for 3Com, maker of corporate phone systems. Outside the building was a very interesting sculpture of their three ring logo, half submerged in the ground. Since I'm still waiting for the arrival of my digital camera, I couldn't take a picture like I would want, but the 3 ring logo can be seen here...
On down the road, I came across a wonderful memory of years ago. My wife and I listen to the WGN Radio Superstation in Chicago and several years ago won a dinner at a very posh restaurant. We hadn't had cause to return there, but I still remember the melt-in-your-mouth 3-inch (7cm) thick steak filet I had there. Magnum's Steak and Lobster is located just east of 3Com on the south side of IL-38.
Also on the way to the dashpoint was the northern edge of Ned Brown Forest Preserve of Cook County, Illinois. This is a fabulous Forest Preserve, complete with its own captive Elk Herd. There are actually two Geocaches in the park, Moving Target (GC1683) and Row, Row, Row Your Boat (GC11E7), both fabulous visits as I had found them both this past summer.
The dashpoint itself was fairly uneventful, resting in a town named Mount Prospect, IL (pop 52,300). The point lies in a little neighborhood north of IL-58, with a park nearby. If you go to the LostOutdoors.com map on the Terraserver photo, you would see the park with two sandy areas - one a baseball diamond and the other a playground. The zero mark was in the back yard of 502 Sunset Road, but the road south of the point got me within 62 meters. With it being only 15°F (-9°C - and a normal high this time of the year at 32°F, 0°C), I was glad to only score this as a drive-by dashpoint.
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December 2001 Statistics
| This
Month | Cummulative |
| Tried Caches | 1 | 50 |
| Found Caches | 1 | 40 |
| Dashes | 3 | 12 |
| Placed Caches | 0 | 7 |
| Hitchhikers Released | 0 | 6 |
Back to November 2001
On To January 2002
Last Updated: Thursday, February 21, 2002 15:00 CST
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December 2001
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