Our First Cache

Nearly five months ago, I wrote a story for The Herald-Palladium about geocaching. Today, Augie and I went for a hike at Sarett Nature Center to check on one of my five caches. When I hid it this spring, everything was dead. Since then, a lot of vegetation has grown up around my cache, which might explain why only one person has found it. If I didn't know where it was, I wouldn't have found it. I was a little disappointed, but I wasn't surprised. Of my five caches, only two of them (Silver Beach and Love Creek) were published on www.geocaching.com. My other ones were deemed too close to existing caches, or planned caches. The one here at Sarett wasn't published because the nature center was planning a hide of its own. The Silver Beach one, predictably, has been the most popular (89 recorded finds to date). I figured that one would've been trashed by now, but it has survived.

Anyway, after finding my cache, we hadn't walked 200 feet down the trail when we stumbled across this beauty. I'm proud to say Augie and I have now found our first geocache ... and it was an accident. It was right next to the trail, pretty much in the open. We almost walked right past it because we weren't looking for other caches.

We signed the log since we found the cache. It looks like some people found it before it was published online, but not many since. Inside was a lady bug eraser and a key to an old Ford vehicle of some sort. We didn't have anything to leave behind, so we left both.