GEOCACHING POTPOURRI--

The land behind Sue (above) is representative of a highly unusual geological formation which exists between Perrysville and Loudonville in nearby Ashland County.  The gentle contours are nicely rounded hillocks known as glacial kames and those in this area are some of the finest examples in Ohio.

They also are very visible on the huge farms along the south side of SR 39 between those two towns.  And, there are a couple more very prominent ones just east of the VFW Post on the east side of Perrysville.

These kames were formed as deposits by the Wisconsinan Glacier about 12,000 years ago.  Lakes build up on the top of glaciers and over geologic time sediment would accumulate and stratify in them.  Then, when the glacier melted, this sediment would be deposited below where the lake had existed.

As I was pondering this I found myself wondering if Mt. Jeeze at Malabar Farm is a large kame.  It pretty much stands by itself and is a very large, nicely rounded formation.

In fact, I have long noticed an unusual ridge formation you encounter when traveling north on Plymouth-Springmill Rd., at the intersection of Dininger Rd.  In that otherwise large area of flat farmland you will encounter a very pronounced east-west ridge.  I remember studying such formations in college geology class and they were known then as moraines.

Today moraines are still described as a ridge formation of unstratified glacial drift.  Could that ridge I mentioned be the product of a bulldozer-like glacier, drifting slowly southward during the last ice age and pushing a small mountain of rocks and soil in front of it until it stopped moving as the ice age was ending and dropped its load along what we now know as Dininger Road?

Recently as I was traveling east on Dininger Rd., toward Bowman Rd., and looking north I noted a large farm complex perched nicely on very distinct, rounded hillocks very much like those in Ashland County.

Makes me wish I had a handy geology professor with whom I might enjoy some discussion.

Then, on that same geocaching day, I had stopped to find a cache in a cemetery near Tiro, Ohio and paused to do the photo (right) to illustrate a log posting showing caching is not just done on sunny days. 

As I was processing the photo I was amused to note the name of the geocache being sought in the photo was "Gc Tstcl Festvl".

The "Gc" stands for GeoCache and the word "Fstvl" showing on the car's GPS is a truncated version of "Festival".

The T-s-t-c-l is a truncated version of the word "testicle."

And, every April Tiro does, indeed, have a festival of that name; making the second half of this story, I fear, a bit less scholarly than the first half.

BTW, most caches we find in this marvelous hobby of geocaching are in the form of small containers with a few trinkets or even smaller containers with just a log for the searcher/finder to sign.  In the case of the kames mentioned above that was my first ever "Earth Cache".

These caches are obviously not container sized, rather they are a way for cachers to celebrate the Earth's natural, geologic blessings by finding and being made more aware of their often stunning existence.