Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Castanea Dentata

Today we set out on an all day adventure to do a 9 stage multi-cache in the Cadillac area. It's very complicated, and if you don't believe me, just take a look at the directions:

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=c5011208-1083-4c4e-9f12-d80f94e4be23

The cache page has that title because it's the scientific name for the American Chestnut tree- which is the theme of the whole cache. We saw some beauties.
Tree 5
As you can see from the following link, we're extremely lucky to have any chestnut trees around at all. The American Chestnut has been decimated and almost totally wiped out in most areas.
http://ncnatural.com/NCNatural/trees/chestnut.html

When we started out, we had no idea that Cadillac was Chestnut Town USA, with a festival, a tour, a walkway, and everything!
http://www.michiweb.com/cadillac/

Scroll all the way down to the Chestnut Town symbol and click on it.
We've enjoyed this website this evening since we got back from our quest, and I know we'll be back down to Cadillac before the week is over to finish this cache!

We got all the stages from 1 through 7, but then we ran into problems. The coordinates that we figured out really took us on a wild goose chase. The plus side of this chase is that the roads we went down were new to us, and very beautiful, even on a gloomy day full of drizzle. We think that we need to go back to stage 7 and search for a different plaque under a different tree to be able to figure out the exact coordinates. Actually, the picture of the Jim Comp plaque on the above website is a big clue for us! I have every confidence that we will eventually prevail.

Jim left a message that he's definitely coming on Sunday, and Kris and Austen may come with him.
Happy