The Adirondack Traveler, placed by Rusty O Junk, is an amazing theme-based moving cache that lives and works in the Adirondack Park of Upstate New York. I understand the reasoning behind the current moratorium on moving caches at geocaching.com, but am glad that this one was grandfathered in and that I will be able to follow its adventures around and around the Park for years to come. I’ve found it once already, and hope to find it again this summer and every summer thereafter.
The Adirondack Park is comprised of over six million acres of mixed public and private
land overseen by the Adirondack Park Agency (APA), which is charged with the protection of this vast natural resource.
The Park has 46 peaks over 4,000 feet, 11 with rare alpine summit vegetation, and some 1,500 peaks over 1,000 feet.
Water resources abound: 2,800 lakes and ponds, 35,000 miles of streams, over one million acres of wetlands.
There are over 5.5 million acres of forests in the Adirondacks, of which 500,000 acres are eastern old growth forest.
The Adirondack Traveler is a traveling cache and its goal is to see as much of the Adirondack Park as possible; it has been to some amazing places inside the Park. I found it hidden near Star Lake, an area I had not previously
explored much prior to the arrival of the Traveler. As soon as it showed up on my PQ of unfound caches, I packed my
Jeep and headed out to become a part of this cool cache’s story. It was hidden at the end of a beautiful trail by a
brook in an area loaded with wildlife -- someone’s favorite spot in the Adirondacks, maybe. I also took the Traveler to a
special spot in the Park in order to share it with the next finder of this cache. The cache listing asks that finders of
the cache leave a teepee of sticks in the spot where the cache was so that people visiting the spot in hopes of finding
it will know that it has moved on to its next location.
I left the teepee of sticks, re-hid the cache by a remote pond, deep in the woods on State Forest Preserve land and posted the new coordinates so that Rusty could change them for the next round of seekers. It has moved twice since I found it ... to an island on a beautiful lake and then to a cave on a mountain. I’m now eligible to find it again (you need to wait for 2 moves between finding it), and am planning my trip as soon as school lets out ... maybe with an overnight.
The Adirondack Traveler is a wonderful cache that visits the best places in the Adirondack Park and allows its seekers to do the same. Here’s hoping it will keep cruising around the Park for a long, long time.