First To Find...Kansas SOG's 11/05/2004

My wife Leisa and I have been geocaching for only a few months and we enjoy it quite a bit. A few weeks ago I started seeing Internet forum posts about finding these "SOG" things, but had no idea what all the fuss was about. I finally found a link on one of the forums to the SkySite website. I sat and read the entire site and was intrigued by the whole concept of getting paid to go find something using the skills we have learned from playing a game(geocaching).

It seemed like a cool idea but I never figured there would be any of these things land close enough to us to allow us to go hunt them. I contacted SSRS and got the paperwork filled out so I(we) could go SOG hunting. Since we live in southwest Missouri, we are pretty close to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas also. I watched the SSRS website for SOG's in our area for a few days and then sort of forgot about it. Then yesterday I thought about it and checked again. I noticed that Kansas had been added to the SOG listings so I clicked on the link. There were two SOG's listed in Kansas, but I did not recognize either of the towns. I went to Yahoo maps and discovered that both of the SOG's were within about 60-70 miles of us. WOOHOO!!

I immediately shot off an email to Mark at SSRS asking if I could try to find these guys. After a few more emails back and forth, I had the coordinates for flights 3063 and 3065. I was just itching to go find them so I asked my boss for the next day(today) off. He said NO PROBLEM...so I was all set.

We got up early this morning and started getting ready to go. Got all our geocaching stuff together, grabbed a couple of Kansas maps, and even remembered to grab the digital camera. It was close to freezing this morning so we grabbed a sweatshirt and a jacket and away we went.

We decided to go to the one farthest away first. When we got close to the area, the road turned into something that was more like a one lane muddy trail. We zeroed in on the cache...err, I mean SOG and it looked like it was going to be about a 1/4 mile hike across a gully and a hilly field. We went on down the road to a house to try and find the landowner. Tried ringing the doorbell and knocking several times but no answer. I walked around back to a couple of barns and sheds to see if maybe someone was back there working. No luck. I was about ready to give up but went back to the house again. This time a lady came to the door. She was the landowner, so I explained to her what I was doing. She started telling me that I might be able to find her hired hand over at "blah blah blah" and that he may have seen it or know where it is. I sort of stopped her at that point and told her I already knew where it was, I just needed her permission to go into the field to look for it. She gave me permission so off we went. Under the fence, down across a small muddy water runoff(luckily there was a log fallen across it), and back up another hill. We were getting close! Mr. Garmin was pointing right into a bunch of small trees and briar patches. I decided to walk around the edge of it rather than try to cut thru that mess. Just as I reached the other side......THERE IT WAS! It was hanging a couple of feet off the ground in a small tree. I snapped a couple of pics and then went over to get it.

 Part of it had fallen off when it landed but it was in good shape. I was able to pull down on the chute lines and free the chute from the thorns it was hung up in. I wound the chute lines around the chute and headed back to the car.

 

 

 

 

One down, one to go.

I brought up the next SOG and hit "GO TO". It was only about 20 miles from the first one. Since I only have Garmin's practically worthless basemap on my GPSr, we just started driving in the general direction. On the aerial photo I had printed out, it looked like this one was just barely off the road so I didn't have much faith that it would still be there. I found the road, and the house that seemed to belong to the field, but drove on down to see if I could get a bearing on where it was. As I got within about 500 feet, I looked out in the field and THERE IT WAS! It was just laying out there in plain sight not more than about 100 feet off the road.

I backed up to the house and tried to find someone, but once again could not raise anyone. I wasn't sure what to do now but decided to go back down to the SOG. As I pulled back out of the driveway, I noticed a car behind me. I watched it in my mirror and it pulled into the driveway behind me. So I backed up and into the driveway again. A girl had gotten out of the car so I went over and told her what we were doing. She was the landowner's daughter and gave me permission to hop over the fence and grab SOG #2. As I approached this one, I noticed a lot of small pieces of it were lying around. It must have come down hard because the bottom section was broken into a bunch of little pieces and the top part had a big hole in it.

 

I looked it over and none of the "guts" looked like they were damaged. I started to pick the thing up and....wait a second, what's this?? As I rolled it over I realized it had landed right smack in the middle of a huge pile of fresh ...uhhmm...COW POOP.

Hmmm....I don't remember reading anything about this situation in the "Rules of Conduct" I signed. I drug it across the ground by the chute lines and got the big chunks off and then found a stick and scraped off most of the remaining poo residue. Grabbed a handful of Kleenex out of the car and wiped it off enough to throw it in the trunk.

 

 

 

 

 

WOW! We had just found the first two Kansas SOG's in less than an hour. We got "Stinky" and his brother home and I sent SSRS an email with the numbers off the bottom of each unit. Got a replay back a little later congratulating us on the FTF KANSAS SOG's!

We drove a little over 200 miles all together today but we were back home by about 1:30PM. It was a lot of fun and we get paid for it to boot. How can you beat that! Even if we never get another SOG, at least we got to find the first two in Kansas. Pretty cool stuff.