Anyone care to share any interesting geocaching stories?

This is probably not what you were looking for, but a friend told me this story. He was out in the bush near a small town about an hour away from my hometown, on a geocaching hike. He found the body of a man who had been missing from the small town for 3 days; he had hanged himself from a tree.

Oh hell yeah! Geocaching rules! I have about 3000 finds and I remember just about every one of them. One of my favorites… I had to look around forever… I knew I was in the right place and the clue said “carry something that holds water”. I gave up and threw my bag down in disgust on the riverbank. Stood up and got my bag and noticed the hole under where it had been…. it was white. A PVC pipe! I grabbed my water bottle and poured it into the hole. Got more from the river and poured more in…

A fishing float came to the surface with the logbook attached!!! I was the first to find!!! Yay!

@Blueroses

Ahh! That’s crazy. I’m just starting out so the whole idea is new to me but I’m super excited to start getting into it. 3000 finds? ... I’ve had one and that’s just because it was down the street from me hahaha

@Seelix… that’s scary. Definitely not doing any geocaching alone at night.

@Seelix eek. I’m always a little afraid of things like that. Geocaching is public so a killer could set up someone for a grisly find. Not that that’s what your friend found, but you’re crashing around in untrodden areas.

@Blueroses – No, it wasn’t a setup or anything. Apparently the cache had been there for quite a long time, and he just happened to come across the body while he was in the same area. It was pretty creepy for him, and it ruined geocaching for him.

at least the cache wasnt on the body or something….

@naivete read the geocaching boards and all of the logs before you go out hunting at first. You will develop a “cache sense” but don’t start off with difficult ones, you’ll just be frustrated. Go for medium to large sizes in a 1–3 difficulty. You’ll have fun with the trade items and you won’t get totally frustrated looking for a fingernail sized magnet on a guard rail.

Those are my favorites now, but when I started I hated the guts and livers of everyone who hid those bastards.

@Blueroses Thanks! I’ll definitely take your advice. I know myself well enough to realize that if I were to not find two geocaches in a row, I’d give up on the whole thing haha

I found a bag of really pretty jewelry made in the 70’s. It was really cool!

Ah! I know you. :) Best advice I can give you is look for a Travel Bug Hotel near you for your first find. They are usually dead easy and give you lots of motivation to continue looking.

@KatetheGreat you just gave me another reason to love you

@Blueroses I feel special :3

oh, and @naivete DO read the newsletter that gets emailed to you and attend any open event near you. It is so fun to meet the regulars and we love newbies! You’ll get a phone list for lifelines to help when you’re out and completely irritated with a hide. (I’m 3 miles from nowhere. What kind of asshole hides a micro where there’s room for an ammo can?)

We were backpacking with cousins in Nova Scotia. They had a GPS with them that they had been using for prospecting work backin their home British Colombia. The backpack trip was in the splendid Cape Chignecto provincial park in the crook of the Bay of Fundy. The Canadian parks are incredible, well maintained trails and with the cleanest outhouses you could hope to find.
We found a cache that had been listed and duly logged it, and per a tradition took something from the cache and left something new in it.

I once found a diamond ring, checked the geo-log and was able to get it back to the owner.

I dont understand. Why would someone put a diamond ring in a cache if they wanted it back?

I’ve only done a couple but I’ve always been the eagle eye. :-)
Then again, it has always been an adventure with nephews or grandkids.

@uberbatman there are many reasons one might put a valuable thing into a cache. I know of a similar story where the girl broke up and took off, put her ring into a cache with a request tag that it get back to her former fiancée. She sort of cared that it got back (family heirloom) and trusted the geocommunity to do it. She didn’t want to do it herself and she had a good reason. It did get back to him. She put a TB tag on it.

@Blueroses even that scenario makes no sense. Give ring to random friend and have it sent, send it yourself at a post office so there is no return address. There are a million better and more reliable ways to get something valuable back to someone other than depending on strangers that find it to carry out your wishes.

@uberbatman yeah. She was making a point. It was specific to the situation but her ex had many problems with addictions and one of them was to geocaching. He would ruin their plans at the last minute to get a first-to-find on a new cache 100 miles away. She sent the ring back through the cache network because… well I guess you can figure out the mind set there.

@Blueroses That’s a really interesting story. An addiction to geocaching… who would have thought.

I get that the lady wanted to “make a point”, but didn’t the ring ordeal just prove how cool geocachers are for getting the ring back without it being kept by someone?
Interesting idea, though.

@uberbatman

It was not part of the cache, it was lost while they were looking for it.

@DrBill ohhhh completely different. Very cool.

@uberbatman Any obsession can be annoying to one who doesn’t share it. I know I alienated a few friends when I got really into caching but I met some fantastic people too. Follow up on the ring story… I don’t know what became of the girl, but she had dropped the ring into a members-only listing with requests that it not go into publicly listed caches and the hope that it would land back in the ex’s hand at GeoWoodstock (because he insisted that would be their honeymoon). It did work out that way and geocaching community is really cool to make that work. He’s now in a great relationship with an equally obsessed woman he met at that event. :)