The SD Star

In the geocaching world, okay - in the US part of the geo world, each state is supposed to have a star of puzzle caches. The South Dakota star was placed and released in March of 2014. We did not get to that project last summer, so it was a must for this summer. We completed it in June.

The geocaches were placed in various spots on various county roads running north and south and east and west within a 4 mile square, approximately. They were good county gravel roads and nothing was on private property. We completed 47 of the 51 caches on Monday afternoon, but needed to go back on Tuesday morning once we redid our research to find the other 4. As you can tell by the smiley faces, we got all 51. The SD Star is near Yankton, in the southeast part of the state.

We had a second project we were working on while in that area, the GC Trail.

We started part of the word GEOCACHING in 2013, but got very frustrated and did not go back until  a couple of weeks ago. We had most of the ING completed prior to this visit. This time we were prepared.

The two gentlemen who placed the caches made some of them quite challenging. We were frustrated the first time because there was no way we could get to some of the caches, even if we could see them. So when we decided to try some more of the GC Trail, we came prepared.

We packed the Little Giant in the van. We used it on 3 occasions. Our GC Trail now looks like this:

The yellow smileys are found and signed cache logs. There are some we will NEVER get, but it looks better than it used to look.

Because we were in the Yankton area and because we have geocached in the town and county before, we foolishly thought we had many caches, beginning with different letters of the alphabet.

Foolishly being the operative word. Since we were there, and we did have the time, we went in search of a cache beginning with each of the 17 letters we did NOT have. The hunt for the missing 17 made the 3 day trip far more adventuresome. Hubby found the X-tra Sticky cache in the tree...thanks to the Little Giant.

We were down to our last letter, N. We stopped at 4 different caches, tough ones in trees and bushes. Most of them had not been found since 2013. That means we were not certain if the cache was still there. After striking out, in the light rain, we decided to head to an earth cache called Niobrara Formations, along the Missouri River dividing South Dakota and Nebraska.

To log an earth cache, we were to stand at ground zero, answer some questions and take a photo of us at that location. We got to the Gavins Point Dam, and the Crest Road we needed to drive on was closed due to road construction. Closed? You have got to be kidding?????

We had spent probably 2 hours driving throughout the county for a successful cache beginning with the letter N. And now...the road is closed!?!

We parked the van on the road at the bottom of the dam berm. We used walking sticks and climbed the dam berm to get to ground zero so we could answer the questions and take our photos.

You can see our tracks in the wet grass. We got it. Twenty-six geocaches, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, all in Yankton County. And YES, we LOVE this hobby!

One of the more pleasant stops that morning was at the office of The South Dakota Magazine. A cache was hidden nearby the historic building (a C titled cache), so while Hubby was searching, I went inside to renew my membership to the magazine. The staff was so helpful, wondering if we had found the nearby geocache, once they learned why we were in Yankton. They were also able to give us the correct coordinates to the cache the magazine hides each year. We put the coords in the GPS and realized it was located on our way home. So we added one more cache to the list, but I will save that adventure for another post.