Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Tribute To The Problem Solvers



He Must Have Found It


I have written before about the art of Geocaching. This is the other side of the coin.

While I have hunted down and found about 50 gecaches in my caching career, I also have two caches that I have hidden for others to find. One is very close to your house and the other is in a mountain preseve on the other side of town.

The one near our house is very easy to find, the other one is called "Peoria Poetry" and takes some hiking and problem solving skills to figure out.

When I first placed this cache over two years ago, I put a bunch of trinkets in it. One of them was a small disposable camera that I picked up at Walgreens for $5. The cache instructions requested that the folks take a picture of themselves and place the camera back in the cache. I thought it would be a neat experiment.

Fast forward to 2008. The cache was getting old and I thought it was about time for some maintenance on it. I hiked to it and found it was still there. I replaced it with a new container and hiked out with the old one. When going through the old cache's contents, I found the camera with a few shots still left on it.

I assumed that the film was probably bad at this point. The cache had been in the widlerness for over 2 years in temperatures that ranged from 110 degrees to below zero. But out of curiousity, I took it to be developed just to see if anything was on it. I was suprised by what I found.

The film is a little faded but still in good shape. If you click the title to this blog or click on this link you can see the rogues gallery of folks that have actually found this cache over the past two years.

All of these folks had to hike over a mile through a mountain preserve to find this cache, not to mention solve some problems along the way. Most of them seem pretty happy that they figured it out.

These are people that go out and try to figure out their world. They are the problem solvers and thinkers. They are our hope for the future.

5 comments:

  1. My husband LOVES to hike.
    I think that geocaching would make it exta fun! When our little ones grow a bit, I'd love to start giving it a go...you can bet I'll be contacting you about how to start.

    WAY COOL that the camera worked!

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  2. THAT IS AWESOME!!

    I loved the pics. Great random group of people, although a couple of them looked very serious. :)

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  3. I am fairly new to your blog and never heard of geocaching before. My hubby and I love to hike, so I will have to do some reseaching on the whole thing.
    You have some very interesting past times!

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  4. We love geocaching, but having a toddler has kept us from doing a lot of it. Can't wait til she's a bit older and will enjoy it too. Right now we do easy caches and call it treasure hunting to get her involved. I love the camera idea!

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  5. great pictures :) they all look like they won prizes, or something.

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