Team Markwell's GPS Adventures
Non omnes vagi perditi sunt
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March 2005

Haunted Tree by mapsandlegends N 41° 54.046 W 087° 57.730 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Found: 3/14/2005 Hunters: Kelly

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

The first find on my Cachiversary IV day (the fourth anniversary of having my GPS guide me to a cool spot). I had specifically loaded the caches in a rectangle bordering the east and west and north and south edges of where I would be going today. I wanted to see if my own GPS database could work as well as I wanted it to. It did. I drove north on 83 from an earlier stop and was headed to the Volo, Illinois area for GD45-CABU. As I drove, this one blipped onto my screen. A nice little park, although with the playground and the baseball diamonds nearby, I'm surprised this one lasted through last summer. It was a good stretch of the legs, even though it was only about 300 feet from the car.

Bridge The Gap - Continental Style by Greenback N 42° 12.661 W 088° 06.594 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Found: 3/14/2005 Hunters: Kelly

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is cache.

The second find on my Cachiversary IV day (the fourth anniversary of having my GPS guide me to a cool spot). Greenback found a nice strong magnet to clamp this one one with. I kind of figured where the cache would be, and it only took me a little time to figure out which place held the cache. This was a great little stop along the way.

Click on Dash Icon to see the Map GD45-CABU Terra Server Picture Coordinates: N 42.3255° W 088.1679° State: Illinois Date Found: 3/14/2005 1:31 pm Hunters: Kelly Temperature: 39°F/4°C Volo, IL, North of Chicago 47.26 miles from home

Green Dot is home. Blue Dot is dashpoint.

Dashpoint Name: One of Foxworthy's Jokes I had been slipping away on reading my daily digest of dashing, so I went out fully thinking this was unscored. Imagine my surprise as I tried to catch up after a busy weekend to see that McMeanderer had already hit it two days before I did (I scored on 3/14/2005 at 13:31 CST). His description was completely accurate, so I'll talk a little about the area and the house just to the north. The house was the one that gave me the title of this report. I don't think I've seen this much stuff on the front porch in quite a while. The picture I uploaded doesn't do it justice, as you can't see everything behind the mattress on the porch. Hense the title referencing one of Jeff Foxworthy's jokes: If people come to your door every day mistakenly thinking that you're having a yard sale - you might be a redneck. Volo, Illinois, is centered very close to the Volo Bog (sounds Estonian, huh?). According to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources site... The current landscape of the northeast corner of Illinois was shaped principally by glacial activity, particularly when the Wisconsin glacier began its final stages of melting thousands of years ago. As it receded, it deposited a blanket of unsorted debris, including clay, sand, gravel and boulders, collectively called glacial till. Embedded in the till were large chunks of ice that broke off the melting glacier. As the climate continued to warm, the ice blocks melted, forming depressions which developed into lakes, bogs and marshes. Volo Bog was originally a deep 50-acre lake, with steep banks and poor drainage. Research on pollen grains preserved in the bog indicates that the lake began filling with vegetation approximately 6,000 years ago. A floating mat, consisting primarily of sphagnum moss formed around the outside edges among the cattails and sedges. As these plants died and decomposed, the peat mat thickened, forming a support material for rooted plants. Because of the lack of drainage and the presence of sphagnum moss, the water in the bog became acidic. This limited the types of plants that could survive and thus created the unique plant communities found in the bog. So, Two Boggy points for Markwell and Trailblazers Here's an interesting addition just for my website: This image, which will take a little while to load, will show the dashpoint in red and my closest point at 12 meters in yellow (upper left-hand corner of the picture) and the elevated boat in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. That elevated boat is the same one in this picture. Cool.