In May, geocachers around the world celebrated 21 years of geocaching. The first caches were placed in May 2000, beginning with Dave Ulmer’s GPS Stash in Oregon. The oldest active cache, of course, is GC30 Mingo, hidden on May 11, 2000.
I have yet to find Mingo. In fact, until this year I had just one 2000 find, GC93 Indiana’s First, hidden Oct. 23, 2000. On a recent trip to Illinois, I found GC28 Beverly, hidden May 13, 2000.
Beverly was an interesting cache to find. The cache page recommends boots and long pants. It warns of poison ivy. I sprayed some DEET on my shoes, arms, legs and neck in the hope of avoiding ticks and went off to find Beverly.
A well-marked trail gets you to within about 300 feet of the cache. From there, it’s a bushwhack. I followed what appeared to be a deer trail back to ground zero. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for until I saw a gallon jug with camo tape hanging on a tree. I opened the jug and there was a nice, well used log, along with what I presume to be the original log book. Its pages were stuck together.
Between the parking lot and the cache are several other caches. Along the way, I found GC1VTYY Blammo! and GC2JM5E Little Diversion.
After finding Beverly, we started the drive back to Indiana, but first we stopped and found caches in DuPage, Kane and Will counties. In the days prior to finding Beverly, I found caches in LaSalle, Ogle, McHenry and Lake counties.
The first cache we found in Illinois was GC516QC Radium Girl. The radium girls worked at a watch factory in Ottawa, Illinois. They painted the glow-in-the-dark paint onto watch faces and licked the paint brush, thus ingesting radium. I did not know their story until I came to this cache.
We took a nice hike at Starved Rock State Park in Illinois to an EarthCache in St. Louis Canyon. After we left Starved Rock, we drove up to Oregon and Lowden State Park, and learned about Lorado Taft and his sculpture of Black Hawk.
In addition to finding a number of caches in Illinois, we made a trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to walk around Carthage College. Although there are no geocaches on campus, we did manage to find two in Kenosha, including GC7B8MD Rosebud, a virtual cache at the gravesite of filmmaker Orson Welles’ mother. This was my first Wisconsin find. I ended up finding four caches in Wisconsin, two in Kenosha County and two in Walworth County.
I’m looking forward to a summer of geocaching, with plans to go to two mega events. What about you, dear reader? What’s the oldest cache you’ve found? What interesting places has geocaching taken you?
Geocaching with Capt. TailWagger 