The thrill is gone from the difficult caches. When I started geocaching, it was enough to get outside, have some fun and a nice walk, get away from the couch or computer, get a bit of exercise, and home-in on an ammo-can full of goodies in the woods ... not anymore. As I found hundreds, and then thousands of geocaches all over the world, the excitement started to pale; I found I needed something more.
I shifted gears first by working out difficult puzzle/cryptogram/clue-based geocaches, and that worked for awhile. I’ve figured out visual and historical puzzles that make the recent movie, “National Treasure” seem like a walking tour of a beer factory. I’ve broken codes that would give the NSA a headache. I’ve worn out encyclopedias and frozen the servers at Google.com plowing my way through complex clues. The thrill is gone from the difficult caches.
Next, I tried caches with increasingly challenging terrain. I went from drive-by caches to short walks to long walks to steep climbs to tricky gear within a couple of weeks ... no problem. If you’re in shape and have the gear, you can do it (I did).
My most recent achievement was a culmination of my years of caching. I had tried so-called "5/5” caches in the past without breaking a sweat (well, ok, I did sweat, but I could do all of them without much trouble). The Ends of the Earth, placed by a cacher known only as “Mr. X”, is one heck of a difficult multi/puzzle cache; I would like to share my story (along with some pictures we took).
Note: the following text/pictures may contain spoilers, proceed with caution.
Stage 1 –Nascar Lines After figuring out a devilish cryptogram utilizing a fractal encryption scheme based on the DNA of Mother Teresa, I called my caching partner in Walla Walla with the words she had always feared would come one day, “Yup, we gotta rent a dang balloon.” The balloon had to be flown over the coordinates the cipher yielded, and the junked cars below would give us the clue we needs to find the next stage of the cache.
Stage 2 – Buoys and Gulls The coordinates we got from the balloon flight seemed unlikely, but we figured on giving it a try anyway. We stayed in Churchill, with Bryan Finneran, a caching buddy from way back, while we arranged our transport out to the cache location. Out in the middle of Hudson Bay in Northern Manitoba, with nothing in sight but a buoy and a spine of ancient rock poking out of the sea, we spent hours looking for the key that would lead us on in our journey. It ended up being a rolled up piece of paper with coordinates to the next stage hidden in a bison tube cleverly disguised as a patch of rust.
Stage 3 – Not a drop Parts of Chile’s Atacama Desert (including the one Mr. X sent us to) have not seen rain in recorded history. We brought extra water at the advice of a caching friend in Santiago. When we finally made our way there, this stage was about 50 miles from the outskirts of “huh?”, a suburb of nowhere, and was hidden in the skull of a long-dead rodent of some sort. We spent a chilly night in the desert working out a complex code that left us facing a haiku that we hoped would eventually lead us to the next stage of the cache.
Stage 4 – Ness to Know You Anybody who tells you that Loch Ness makes for nice swimming has never been there. We got in touch with Dougal McNamara, a caching friend of mine in Edinborough, to borrow his old Royal Navy diving suit, and made our way through Scotland with only a few stops for tours and some single-malt. The peat was thick in Loch Ness, which thankfully shielded me from Nessie (and vice versa). This stage was comprised of a dozen Pelican cases tethered to an anchor about 200 feet below the surface, directly below the point where my GPSr zeroed out. I contacted a friend in Bombay for some help with both Sanskrit and ternary encoding, and we were off again…this time to the Jungfrau region of Switzerland.
Stage 5 – Kleine Scheidegg (Gesundheit!) I’m not going to tell you which of the three accepted routes we took, suffice it to say that my recent trip to K2 certainly came in handy when we were up on the side of the Eiger’s north face, looking for what turned out to be an ammo-can camouflaged perfectly to blend in with the volcanic rock that makes up this mountain’s face. I was shivering in my bivysack 3000 feet above the valley floor, trying to work out a modified vigenere square, using the Swiss articles of confederation as the key, without the document (luckily I remembered most of it, and could fill in the blanks). We were praying for a warm destination for the final stage ... be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Stage 6 – Thai-ed in knots We flew into Vientiane, Laos, to stay with Pakpao Lawan, a caching friend for a few days of rest before crossing into Thailand at Nong Khai. The coordinates for the final stage of the cache were in the jungle region in the northeast, and we felt that a chopped would be the best way in. We rappelled to the forest floor, surrounded by the eerie quiet and false twilight the old growth rainforest offered visitors such as ourselves, and listened to the dull sound of the helicopter fading away to the south of us. GPS signals were pretty crappy under all of the huge trees and impenetrable canopy, but we did our best, and finally found the huge ammo-trunk hidden about 80 feet up inside a dead Mahogany tree hollowed out by time and tough bugs.
The cache was filled with mctoys, bottle-caps, and some religious pamphlets ... signed log, took matchbox car, left carabineer.