GeekBoy.from.Illinois was in town with his wife for her conference so we'd planned on doing some Saturday caching with
TeamLegend4. Unfortunately all of the women in the group were unavailable leaving us to have a guys day of caching. The weather ended up being a little worse than we'd expected (Bill and I drove past at least four major accidents on the way out of Metro Detroit and many more spin-outs along the way) but not too bad for some caching. One of the nice things about snow over rain is that its better for caching. The cold temperatures and driving snow at times made the caching a little uncomfortable, but most of the time we were walking with the protection of the trees or buildings. The most memorable group of caches were the ones we did just before lunch -- three regular sized, easy to find containers in a large community sports park with about a mile of walking. That's about a mile of hiking through the couple inches of already fallen snow with more coming down. The winter weather certainly complicated the finds, but the experience was even more sweet.
Two of the finds were
different hides though. GeekBoy's 1,100th find was on a cache just out in the open, chained down, and hidden in a nicely crafted wooden box. The actual cache container was inside, one of the
Groundspeak locking plastic containers, watched by a trio of skeletons. Another interesting hide was the basic peanut butter container screwed to the underside of the boardwalk near the Huron River. The container was nothing special, but the Hider took a few moments to set-up a guard on the nearby support to watch over the cache. It's not often we run into creative hides any more which are designed purely for the aesthetics. Just last weekend though we'd found another
cool hide from a local Cacher marking the discovery of Mastodon bones in the area. Its nice to see Hiders putting in the effort on making their caches more memorable, not just more clever.
Groundspeak's "Lost & Found Celebration" was a huge event with a street fair feel, but there was one activity that took most of our time. We (TeamLegend4, Drie, and I) spent most of the event hunting the challenge caches placed by Geoteaming just for the event.
Each of the cache was themed as a year in Geocaching (2000-2009/10) using a notable event in Geocaching from that year. Each cache contained some props and a QR code for smartphone users to pull up information about the theme of that cache. It was all very well assembled, but really the creativity of the caches are what impressed me the most. Granted some of thes containers wouldn't stand up well for very long, but they don't need to for an event like this
(some of the favorites are included here). The hunt took us around the area, mostly on foot, for an exhaustive and time consuming tour. When we returned to the Geoteaming tent about 15 minutes prior to the end of the Celebration we were told there had been only about eight teams to finish all ten. I'm not at all surprised with the distances between hides. Too bad we didn't get a smiley for each one, but what a great time we had and it brought back memories from the five short years I've been caching with reminders of how much has changed. My thanks to the Geoteaming and Groundspeak crews for a job well done. Perhaps there are some ideas for other cachers in their future events?
