October 2008 GGA Challenge Event Meeting Notes

The GGA held its 7th annual “GGA Challenge Event” on October 11th at the Elachee Nature Center near Gainesville, Georgia. This was not the first Challenge Event held at Elachee but this year we were lucky enough to have the Preserve Manager, Cynthia Taylor, speak to us about the work they do at the nature center and how we can help stamp out invasive plants.

Forty four GPS teams participated in the actual challenge, but there were 76 people present for the event, with 47 old members under 41 geonicks and 15 new members under 13 geonicks.

The theme of the challenge event was a poker run, similar to last year’s game. The caches contained sealed envelopes with individual playing cards. The object was to find up to twelve caches, then make the best possible poker hand with five of the twelve cards. The cache hunters returned by 3:30pm to have their envelopes opened and checked off. This was followed by a game of “who has the highest hand.”

This was the second year that JMTBuzz came in first place with a winning hand of four of a kind. The top 10 finishers were JMTBuzz, The Waysiders, CarsonI, harthunter, bripod, owl1959, erik88l-r, nzkiwi74, Dougs94 and Linda, and arabia. However, everyone who played was a winner and got a prize.

The Challenge Event runs smoothly due to the efforts of the volunteers on the Games Team and the Support Team.

On the Games Team we had both experienced Challenge Event hiders as well as “first time” Challenge Event hiders. All did a great job making the hunters earn their poker hands. So hats off to erik, Trez, geomuse (and izzy~bel), Joebids, DragonFlyDreams and phat.bak for their excellent hiding skills. A special shoutout to geomuse for her poker hand poster that helped everyone figure out their best poke hand and to Trez and erik for leading the team and gathering the prizes.

On the Support Team we had master chef St. Michael aided by mtn-man and Tarvol. Peaches brought her world famous chili (which was gone in a flash) as well as brunswick stew. Thanks also to Carol who helped get everything setup and organized, ready for everyone to chow down. A special shoutout to Doug and Linda who took out the trash – literally.

You can read the logs of those who attended, and see the gallery of pictures at this link:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=...9b-b9fd-fbee64c99a2f
(note: you’ll need to be logged into geocaching.com to view the page)

Sorry sorry to see the award we presented to Cynthia didn't make the notes. Good notes otherwise.