Over the weekend I had the opportunity to join my caching buddies on a couple of caches. One of them Into the Mouth of Madness was pretty cool! It's always fun to do a cache in an unusual location, and this one fit the bill.
Determining ground zero was based on figuring out the co-ordinates with some information grabbing and waypoint projections. Then getting to ground zero took some careful maneuvering....
Staring into the mouth of madness. Yes, we were venturing in there....
Tom adjusts Mary's headlamp. I sure need to get one of these....
Here's the view as we headed in....
These are 2 of the clues to watch for from the cache page. So far so good and we were headed in the right direction...
There's a series of drain tunnels underground. Which one to choose? We let Bill pick...
We were pretty far underground. This is looking up and the light overhead is the manhole cover to the street above....
We continued along our way, flashing our lights around and looking for the cache. We did find it, but I won't show it to you. After some comical maneuvering we retrieved the cache, signed it, dropped it in the water, fished it back out and managed to get it back into its hiding place. Now to find our way back out.
Just for fun we all turned off our flashlights and yes, it really was that dark down there....
Slowly we picked our way back out through the maze of tunnels...
Ahhhh..... sigh of relief, the light at the end of the tunnel.....
... and an eerie figure beckoning to us....
Mary, Tom, Linda and Bill make their way out of the mouth of madness....
Mary was stepping across the water when we were leaving the tunnel and none of us realized how slick the algae covered cement was. She took a fall and the water started sweeping her down steam. Thanks to Bill's quick thinking, he grabbed the hood of her sweat shirt and saved her!
Check out the graphic Chicago graffiti to the right of me on the wall. LOL!
Our badges of honor. We had to stamp our hands using a letter stamp that was inside the cache to prove we found the cache...
It was quite the trek away from the mouth of madness and it was worth every second of it. We had a great time!
We grabbed a couple of geocaches on our way out and called it a day.
