Team Markwell's GPS Adventures
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February 2004

Click on Dash Icon to see the Map GD32-BYVA Terra Server Picture from LostOutdoors.com Coordinates: N 41.6910° W 088.1199° State: Illinois Date Found: 2/1/2004 2:02 pm Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sam, Sherry Near Clow International Airport, Bolingbrook, IL 6.55 miles from home

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is dashpoint.

Dashpoint Name: The Cholesterol Triangle Clow International Airport (FAA ID 1C5). Now there's a joke. This “international” airport only averages 137 operations per day (O'Hare International Airport is listed as 2,567 per day). The landing strip comes dangerously close to the Meijer's omni-shop on the east side. While the airport used to be out in the middle of farmfield, the encroaching urban sprawl has surrounded the landing field with Circuit City, Home Depot, a Movie Theater, Best Buy, Target, Meijer's, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Just to the south of the airport, there's a triangular trifecta of cholesterol consternation: the northern point has an Olive Garden; the eastern point has a Gyro's and Beef stand; the western point has a Krispy Kreme. Inside the center of this cardiologist's nightmare lies a ready-to-be-developed plot of farmland that has had the streets laid but no buildings erected. We were able to drive the streets and mark the GPS at around 4 meters. Interestingly, this was also the third closest dashpoint to my house. Disregarding Scout's April Fools joke of April 2003, there was GD13-BYYD at 1.3 miles from home and GD29-BYUX at 3.8 miles from home (although I couldn’t get to that one). Now this one has displaced GD25-BYYP in my number 3 closest score. Thanks for a nice diversion. BTW - we had lunch at the Olive Garden.

Click on Dash Icon to see the Map GD32-BYXU Terra Server Picture from LostOutdoors.com Coordinates: N 41.5262° W 087.9831° State: Illinois Date Found: 2/16/2004 11:03 am Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sam New Lenox, Near I-80 and Route 30, SW of Chicago 15.08 miles from home

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is dashpoint.

Dashpoint Name: Near the Old Fort Monday was President's Day, which afforded me some time to do some caching and dashing. The town of New Lenox, Illinois, has some really neat history, but this dashpoint isn't in New Lenox. It's just between New Lenox and Joliet. The dashpoint itself is hardly interesting. It lies at a T intersection on the south side of a subdivision near where Frances Road cross I-80. To the south of the dashpoint are some small private woods. To the north is the road and the intersection. Pictures are posted. But the more interesting tale to tell is of the forest preserve just to the northwest of the point. The preserve is called Higgenbotham Woods and supposedly houses an old French Fort erected in 1729. I have found a (now archived) cache in the area and it was a real trip. I was almost out to revisit the location, but time pressed, so I relented. However, here's a quote from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources on the site: "The Higginbotham Woods Earthwork is an irregularly-shaped earthen embankment located in a City of Joliet park. It probably belongs to the Hopewellian Period when earthworks of similar design were created up and down the Illinois River Valley. Although little has been found at this site by archeologists to date this earthwork, there is no evidence that this is a historic fort as commonly believed. Higginbotham is the last of the ancient earthworks that once lined the Illinois-Des Plaines rivers. "

YL #6 by Ron Schmars N 41° 37.879 W 088° 24.715 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Found: 2/16/2004 Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sherry, Jean and her boys

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

The first of three tried in the park today with Jean and her boys. I honed in on the location pretty quickly, but not after we wasted some time going up and down a pretty big hill. Glad I had the hiking boots and long-johns on!

Forever Young by Ron Schmars N 41° 38.029 W 088° 24.764 Difficulty: Terrain: Original Date Found: 12/15/2002 Date Revisited: 2/16/2004 Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Jean and her Boys

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

This is the third time I've visited this cache. My first find on it was in December of 2002 - then I re-visited with Centaur back in February of 2003 after the Cheeseburger Event. Today, we were walking between YL #6 and Another Young F.P. Cache, and the boys found this one. Yep. It's right where I remembered it.

Another Young F.P. Cache by wvh2opolo N 41° 38.275 W 088° 24.861 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Found: 2/16/2004 Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sam, Jean and her boys

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

A very interesting hide. The spot was choice, and it was just off trail enough to make it very interesting. One of the boys accompanying us found it (on my suggestion), but the other adult had looked right at it and missed it. Small container, no trading, but my youngest boy had a blast digging in the snow with a twig while we searched for a while. After having exhausted ourselves, we abandoned my original plans of searching for Young Lyon and The new bobcat, but it was a good day of caching and dashing.

Click on Dash Icon to see the Map GD32-BYQY Terra Server Picture from LostOutdoors.com Coordinates: N 41.5956° W 088.6826° State: Illinois Date Tried: 2/16/2004 4:46 pm Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sam Farmland near Sandwich and Soumanauk, IL 23.64 miles from home

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is dashpoint.

Dashpoint Name: She's beautiful, she's rich, she's got huge ... tracts of land. One of my favorite scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, right up there with the French Taunting Scene. The area southwest of Sandwich, Illinois and south of Soumanauk is ripe with farmland - so much so that the roads are not in the usual 1 mile grid that you can so readily find in Illinois. The tracts of land are, well, HUGE. Hence, my approach was dubious at the onset, but I figured I'd give it a try anyways. As I approached, it was as I feared: the land was locked by private property farmland and private undeveloped land, and the closest I got was at 661 meters due south of the point. There's a creek running through the area, and this was once home to some gravel pits (according to topo map and satellite images), but everything around the area was marked as No Tresspassing. It really is a shame because this looked like some beautiful hiking. There's a photo that I took almost at the closest proximity showing the deep vertical descent (well - it's deep for Illinois) and the varied terrain that would have been nice to visit. Ah well.

Click on Dash Icon to see the Map GD32-BYIX Terra Server Picture from LostOutdoors.com Coordinates: N 41.3791° W 089.2426° State: Illinois Date Found: 2/21/2004 1:53 pm Hunters: Kelly, Drew, Sam, Rachi Northern Illinois, Centered E-W in the State 55.50 miles from home

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is dashpoint.

Dashpoint Name: Leftovers in Ladd It was a gray and dismally disappointing day. Temperatures had soared this week to close to 50°F (10°C), but today was little more than the freezing point of water, with a gray overcast. I had spent the morning with my mother and two sons attending a dog show in Chicago, as we are looking at a new pup for the summer. We returned home around 12:30 - but since my wife was out of town, I just kept the boys in the car, loaded up the current dog (she loves long car rides) and headed out. The drive was uneventful - straight out I-80 to almost exactly the mid-point of the state between the east and west borders. We exited the interstate with scarcely more than 2KM to go to the point. The topo maps showed the point as about 25m north of an intersection with a railroad and the road itself - an easy drive-by. The reality was that the rail line listed on the topo map was abandoned and dismantled many years ago, with the land reverting back to the adjacent property owners. Along the road was a fence blocking the straight-as-an-arrow path that was once the railroad. The fence also had numerous No Trespassing signs. As we drove past the scoring point of 23 meters, we turned the vehicle around. We could see to the south of the road the large horizontal concrete pipe (some 5m in diameter!) that would have handled the drainage under the railway. Quite neat to see. A picture of the fence is posted in GD032's folder. The rest of the town of Ladd, Illinois (just about 1KM to the east of the point) was a study in leftovers as well. One thing I noticed on my return to the interstate was a HUGE hill. Usually, I wouldn't give something like this a second look, but in the flat and featureless Illinois landscape, it stuck out like a sore thumb - obviously man-made. I took a picture of the tree covered hill which was apparently the opposite of a very large hole. A stop at the local Casey's Gas Station for some goodies for the boys also confirmed that this was once a coal mining town, and that hill was what they dug up when they mined the area. The last leftover was near the interstate. There's a large crane operation for construction that had placed a sizable Christmas Tree at the top of one of its cranes. Evidently it is lit during the holiday season, but they just haven't gotten a chance to take it down yet. A picture of the tree on the crane is also in the GD032 folder. All this talk of leftovers has made me hungry. ;-)

Between Highway and Flyway by Nash79 N 41° 36.106 W 088° 09.839 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Found: 2/28/2004 Hunters: Kelly

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

Wow - this is the closest cache ever placed to my house not placed by me. How could I let this slip by? I actually had used the Lake Renwick Rookery as part of the first placement of Liberal Arts, but that was about the same time that a decree came out from Will County that they didn't want caches in their Nature Preserves (Forest Preserves were OK though). However, I never knew that this part of the park was even here. Man! Almost 37 years in the area and I never knew that this park (just over 4 miles from my house) existed with this path. Amazing. The cache was in the second place I expected it to be but not far off. I was able to find it with a minimum of looking (the difficulty at 1.0 was right on).

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Last Updated:
Monday, March 1, 2004 17:00 CST