Of Shrubbery and Geocaching

As promised, this week's edition of Brigham's Buckets will focus on some random fun facts on shrubbery and geocaching. These riveting subjects stem from a conversation with Amber Mercer when she spotted approximately seven deer eating leaves outside the Richards Building last Thursday the 18th of February at 6:01 pm MST (see photo). Somehow that deer sighting led to an information exchange involving facts about shrubbery and geocaching, which we will now discuss.

The term "shrub" can be used interchangeably with the word "bush." If you've ever laid eyes upon a bush, you've seen a shrub! Shrubs can be differentiated from trees by an inspection of the base of the plant. A tree has one single trunk that emerges from the earth and splits into different branches well above the ground. A shrub, however, splits into several different branches right from the base and lacks a single trunk. A hedge is made up of several different shrubs that together form a conglomerate landscape feature. 

Shrubs can be tricky as they can be subsetted one step further into what are known as "subshrubs." These little guys are basically just smaller versions of shrubs that don't ever grow to be as tall. They've even been described by some as "not as going up." Another tricky thing about shrubs is that sometimes the line between shrubs and trees can be rather grey. In fact, some plants can even be classified as both shrubs and trees! Fascinating stuff.

Geocaching wasn't a thing until the early 2000s, which was actually surprising to me. The government did not release GPS tools to the general public until that time, so I guess geocaching would have been basically impossible without some device that tracks your precise location and the precise location of a cache. 

In what would seem to be a rather innocent and uneventful activity, geocaching has actually led to some wild stories. Below are a few:

• Some hikers got lost and in their desperation found a cave in the snow. In it was a geocache and they were able to use the coordinates from that to call in search and rescue.
• While looking for a geocache some people discovered a car in the bottom of a ravine. Upon investigation they found a person in the car that was somehow still alive and they were able to get the person rescued.
• Several people have fallen from cliffs while searching for geocaches.

There is a geocache at Kiwanis park that we successfully discovered last night. Luckily it involved no traversing ravines or cliffs to find, and to spice things up we added a cool mummy finger puppet to it for the next time. Thanks to Amber Mercer for her research and insights on shrubbery as well as for her photo of the RB deer.