International Earthcache Day

I saw this a few weeks ago on Facebook:

Celebrate International Earthcache Day on Sunday, October 14 by logging an Earthcache. Find an Earthcache at www.geocaching.com. The 6th annual International Earthcache Day returns, to help kick-off Earth Science Week 2012. Join the Geological Society of America (GSA), which oversees the global Earthcache program, and the American Geosciences Institute (AGI), which organizes Earth Science Week. Explore this exciting and educational Earth science experience which often reveals hidden clues about the earth's formation.  There are more than 23,000 Earthcaches around the globe and a staggering 3,300,000 people have logged those caches to date.  Visit www.earthcache.org and www.earthsciweek.org to learn more. 

I called Bev, we need to find an earthcache on Sunday, October 14!  She wanted details.  I explained to her what I read and she was on board.  Her, along with everyone else who saw it, wondered if we got a badge for logging an earthcache on that day.  I told her I didn't know.  I seriously doubted it though.

We decided to go for the artesian well in Eatonville since that was the closest earthcache, without going out of our way.  I'm really glad we decided to save it for this occasion.

I got a few texts the night before to make sure we had pH strips, a stop watch and some containers to put the water in.  We were all set.

They arrived around nine and we all piled in the car, Mike included.  We headed towards Eatonville.  Our GPS maps lied to us so we had to do some turning around and back tracking, with geocaching who hasn't right?

We got to the posted coords and there it was.  It reminded me of an actual well.  The one we did before in Olympia was just a pipe running into a drain.  Bev took a sample of the well water to take home and Bob and I did the actual gallon/per min experiment.  It took seven seconds to get to a gallon of water.

N 46° 53.595 W 122° 17.074

Bev gathering well water to take home.

Me gathering lake water to compare.

Going over our data.

Determining pH and if it was alkaline or acidic.

After finishing our earthcache, we decided to go for a few others in town we haven't gotten yet.  Since Bob and Bev basically cleared out Eatonville, there really wasn't a lot of them to get.  We did find a few to grab though.  

We went to a small park to find one that was suppose to be easy.  Yeah right.  We probably spent over a half hour looking for something that probably wasn't there.  We ended up DNF'ing it.

I had no idea she was taking my picture. I'm surprised.

Bob coming back from bush whacking.

Mike looking in other directions.

We went to the church for one we haven't gotten yet.  We forgot it was Sunday...

Luckily we found it fairly quickly before someone from inside the church came out to ask what we were doing.

Bob stopped at one on the way home that Mike and I haven't gotten yet.  Three more to cross off the Eatonville list. 

Next adventure:  Longview/Kelso/Kalama.