The Dimming of the Day

Once we completed the Pocahontas County geochallenge for this year, we learned about another geochallenge happening in the area, the Route 39 Byway Challenge. Unfortunately, this series proved to be somewhat more disorganized than the Pocahontas County challenge. We had managed to find a few of the geocaches in this series (the first one, Jailhouse Blues, was entirely accidental), but one was entirely elusive and it turned us off of completing series. Several other experienced cachers had failed to ever log a find on the cache and the cache owner appeared to be oblivious on how to remedy the situation. 

What this drove home to us is the power of geocaching as a tourism tool. The promise of a cool, fun, well-curated geocaching tour lures cachers like us to an area. However, a poorly executed series rapidly leads to grumpiness. Other issues with this series included lacking a central place to get information on the trail, incomplete and inconsistent passport sheets to record the finds, multiple owners of the caches (which makes it difficult to find a list or contact owners online). Though probably the most egregious error was in creating a series commemorating Route 39 specifically, one of the caches required a 90 minute round trip deadhead south of the route to log one of the caches. But no one says you must complete all of the challenges, so we didn’t. We enjoyed the quick detour into Bath County, VA and once we became annoyed we changed strategies.

The original Jefferson Baths at Warm Springs, Virginia along Route 39

We headed north on U.S. Route 220. This is an utterly stunning drive in Virginia and West Virginia. It isn’t even too bad if you keep following it through Maryland and Pennsylvania. But we headed toward Seneca Rocks and right at dusk found ourselves at the New Germany Valley overlook. We got out of the car stretched our legs and took photographs (and logged an earthcache!).

Sitting on a guadrail with Germany Valley behind me, utterly breathtaking

Given the dimming of the day, we cruised down through Monkeytown and toward Elkins where we had dinner. The long days of late spring sometimes seem to have a disorienting effect on when it’s time to eat or even when it’s time to head toward home.