The Town of Greenwood is accepting applications for both a highway foreman and a truck driver/heavy equipment operator/laborer. Stop by or contact the Town Office at 875-2773 for more information.
If you haven’t yet been to see the new exhibits at the Greenwood Historical Society, including Blaine’s Corner, dedicated to the memory of Blaine Mills, whose tireless efforts over several decades to preserve and share local history were unmatched, keep an eye out for the open flag and stop by. I’m not sure if they have volunteers to cover every summer Saturday, the way Blaine used to do, but I’m sure they’ll be open when they can.
Next week is looking like a crazy one. Our granddaughter, Lila, and her mom, Katie, will be making two visits to camp, the first from Sunday to Tuesday, with our annual trip to Santa’s Village scheduled for Monday—fingers crossed for decent weather. They’ll be back again on Friday to celebrate Tony’s and Will’s birthdays, which are both on August 1, and will probably stay through Sunday afternoon if the weather is good for swimming and boating.
In between their two visits, Donna will be here for a few days to help me with a couple of major organizing projects at work that I’ve been putting off because they feel overwhelming without the help of an outstanding organizer, which she definitely is. I hate to admit it, but I just don’t think I was born with a very well-developed organizing gene, and she was. She’ll arrive with an assortment of bins, boxes, and labeling materials, as well as a good sense of what’s trash and what’s treasure, something I often have a hard time determining on my own, and she’ll have my messy office and storage areas whipped into shape in no time. Then, in a year or so, everything will have gone downhill again, and she’ll sigh and shake her head and come back to help me with it again.
Eli the Wonder Pup has been our guest at camp this weekend, and he is still somewhat redolent with skunk smell. (I shared the story of how he got that way in last week’s online-only column. And I don’t think it’s really that bad, but Tony seems to think otherwise, and I’ll admit that every time he gets wet, the smell is noticeably stronger.) He and I had a nice hike to Buck’s Ledge and the summit of Moody Mountain on Sunday morning, before breakfast (before breakfast for me, but after breakfast for him) and before the rain came. Jane Chandler had dropped off a new logbook for the geocache box at the summit and asked me to carry it up there on one of my hikes, so I did that.
In case you’re not a geocacher (as I’m not) and don’t know what it’s all about, here are a few basic facts. The game, or activity, hobby, or whatever, is a kind of outdoor treasure hunt in which people use GPS coordinates to find hidden containers, called geocaches. The caches are waterproof containers with a logbook and, sometimes, a few trinkets, such as small toys, keychains, or other low-cost items. Those who discover the cache can take a trinket and leave another in its place, or just sign the logbook. Geocaching got its start in Oregon in 2000, and now there are well over three million caches hidden across all seven continents. The nonprofit website geocaching.com allows people to register for a free account and provides instructions for getting started.
I have to admit that I’ve been using the logbook on top of Moody Mountain for as long as it’s been there as just a basic sign-in book for writing the dates I’ve hiked there, weather and trail conditions, and that sort of thing. That seems to be how it’s used by most people, as most entries don’t include geocaching code names, but I think that’s okay. The logbook provides an opportunity for people to give their impressions of the trail system and express their gratitude to the hardworking visionaries who created and maintain the Buck’s Ledge Community Forest. But now that I know that it’s actually a geocaching logbook, I finally understand why it’s not in a very obvious location! Have you hiked to the summit of Moody, and have you discovered it?
If you have news or events you’d like included here, email me at amy.w.chapman@gmail.com or call 207-890-4812. The next print issue of the Citizen will be out on August 8, but you can read the Locke’s Mills column online every week at amywchapman.com, or subscribe for free to have it emailed to you each week.
“Not all who wander are lost; some are just geocaching.” – Anonymous
Geocaching sounds too cool. Great idea!