I found this cache while enjoying an awesome geocaching vacation this spring (I slept in four mornings in a row, didn’t change one diaper, ate junky food, watched pay-per-view in funny smelling hotel rooms, put about 1000 miles on my Jeep and found 37 caches in 5 days ... it was heaven!). Of all the caches I found on this geocaching adventure, the one that best combined a beautiful setting with a thought-provoking cache was a spot that is a serious parody of itself, the Museum of Modern Artifacts (I know, it hurt me to type “serious” and “parody” together, but it’s true) located in Vermont.

The Museum of Modern Artifacts cache is located at the top of a ridge with a glorious view up and down the length of a “Vermontish” valley (sparsely populated, heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and bisected by a mostly empty highway ... a microcosm of the entire state). The day I made the climb to the cache, there was about a foot and a half of melting snow everywhere. Consequently, there was lots of sliding involved, going up and coming down; the up side of the slipperiness is that the snow made for softer landings when I fell down (which happened a lot). Once I found the cache, the interesting part of the exercise began.

The cache looks like a standard camouflaged ammo can with log and trade items from the outside, but the listing is certainly out of the ordinary. It takes you behind the curtain into the world of cache maintenance and depreciation over time by directing geocachers to go beyond the usual logging procedures. Cachers are asked to:

1) make your trade if you’re trading
2) make a detailed inventory of the cache contents
3) lay out the contents on the cloth background
4) photograph the contents
5) put everything away
6) include the photograph and the inventory in your online log
7) failure to follow these directions will result in the log (and find) being deleted.

The idea behind this rigmarole is to track the contents of the cache over its lifespan and see if the overall quality decreases over time. Geocachers the world over complain that the longer the cache is in existence the lower the quality of the trade items within the container. In a perfect world, cachers would “trade even or trade up,” and the quality of a cache’s contents would only improve over time; in the real world caches often lose the good stuff they start off with and accumulate things like scuffed golf balls, bottle caps and expired coupons. This cache forces each visitor to examine (and record!) the way they trade and to see that trade in terms of the cache’s overall lifespan.

I followed the directions and took a picture of the cache contents after my trade; I tried, as usual, to leave better than I took. It occurred to me that peoples’ trade behavior might be improved due to the rules in this particular cache, but not overall (another validation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle). Even if this is the case, it will certainly make every visitor to the cache (and maybe some readers of this article) think about their cache-trade ethics, which is more than the average cache does.

I loved the idea of this cache before, during and after my visit and have checked in a few times since my visit to see how subsequent visits have affected the cache contents with interest. The fun climb and spectacular view were unexpected but very welcome bonuses. A cache that stimulates both body and mind is a gift for all who visit it, and the Museum of Modern Artifacts is just that type of cache.