Blogging about my caches

I wanted to start sharing my various geocache experiences with those stopping by this page in the hopes that these stories will entice more people to get out and join the geocache movement.

Though this website is primarily focused on teaching others about the sport of Geocaching, I would like to share me experiences in other activities here as well. Geocaching is just one of my many hobbies, others of which include: kayaking, collecting Japanese katanas & learning Iaido, fly fishing (or so I’m attempting to do), blogging (on sites just like this!), weight lifting, hunting, hiking, and coin collecting. To be honest geocaching is actually a fairly new hobby of mine and is something I stumbled across accidently while hunting in northern Idaho.

My first cache

While on an elk hunting trip with my father and a couple other family friends we were hunting up the Selway river northeast of Kooskia Idaho. We had driven a 32 foot RV across the country to accommodate the 4 of us on this hunting trip which took a couple days to make. At times it was a good bonding experience and other times we were ready to kill each other. It’s naïve to think that four guys could be locked in small quarters for a few days and not get on each other’s nerves.

Anyway when you think of rural America this place is the picture perfect example of such. The Selway Bitterroot is one of the largest designated wilderness areas in the country so the last place I’d expect to stumble across a Plano box full of treasures and logbooks would be here.

While fishing the river I had to take a leak so I ran up the bank and went behind a tree, this is where I saw the box. At first I thought it may have been left behind by some campers who had a kid since there were a lot of children’s toys in it (plastic parachute figurine, clicker, maraca, etc.).

As I started going through the box I found a logbook full of messages and weird signature names. I sat down and started going through every page, each note had a joyful saying followed by the date, where they were from, and the signature (which I later learned was their user ID for Geocaching.com).

Eventually a few pages in I came across one that really got my attention, a note from someone in Littleton NH, the town where I was from. Now for someone from Boston or Philadelphia that may not seem like a big deal due to the population of those cities, however Littleton NH is a town of about 6,000 people located in Northern NH. I couldn’t believe that someone from my town was actually in that exact same spot I was standing in there, in the middle of nowhere thousands of miles across the country. The photo below shows how rural this cache really was.

Finding this cache in Idaho and the tie it had back to home not to mention all the other countries that people were from in the logbook had me really interested in this concept. Unfortunately no one in my social circle at the time had any idea what this was when I returned home and shared the story with them therefore the concept of ‘Geocaching’ would still remain a mystery to me for a few more years.

Learning about geocaching

It wasn’t until I moved to Pennsylvania were I met some individuals in a team building course that were talking about geocaching. The term was foreign to me but what they were describing was not, it immediately made me think of that box I found in a tree trunk 6 years back. I told them my story and that was when they had informed me that on that day I stumbled upon my first cache. They explained the sport to me, how many people are estimated to be engaged in it, the number of caches worldwide, and the various types of caches out there.

I was hooked, I went home and downloaded the app on my phone and then starting finding local caches. My first cache here was a vial hidden in a guard rail that I searched for with my fiancé. I don’t think I’ve completely won her over on the sport yet however I’ll keep trying.

Anyway that is the story of how I became introduced to geocaching, an accidental stumble upon a plastic box in the backwoods of Idaho showed me that there is an international game being played every day, in every country, that ties us all together and give me a sense of unity with those also geocaching throughout the rest of the world.

I’ll use this blog section to share my interesting cache finds as well as anything else that may be exciting going on in my life. Hope you stop back by!