Mingo

This entry is another trip back in time to the road trip I took with my youngest in 2017. It's a continuation of the journey that took us to Beloit, Wisconsin and back again. When last I wrote about this trip here, we were in Abilene, Kansas touring the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

After the tour, we had some lunch and then took off to drive west across Kansas geocaching every so often along the way. It gives me an excuse every now and then to stop and stretch our legs as well, so the drivers don't get too tired along the way. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Actually, the purpose of this leg of the trip was to get to Colby, Kansas and find Mingo, which is the oldest, active geocache in the world. Mingo was hidden on May 11th, 2000, just days after President Clinton signed an executive order descrambling GPS signals so they could be used for civilian purposes. That order basically was the birth of geocaching. One of the challenge caches I've been working on for quite awhile is the Jasmer challenge - to find a cache that was hidden in every month since geocaching started. Mingo helped me get a little bit closer to that goal, getting me May 2000. On a road trip two years later I found a cache in Utah that was hidden in August 2000 giving me that month. As of this moment, I just need June and July of 2000, which is why sometime after I'm vaccinated, I want to go on a road trip to Oregon, since the two nearest caches that fill those two months are hidden up there.

Mingo is sort of a Mecca in the geocaching world. Everyone seemingly wants to find it and it's quite famous in the geocaching world. It's literally located off of an on ramp to the freeway that passes by. As we approached Mingo, I said, "There's supposedly a geo-trail leading to the cache and it's not that difficult to locate." My youngest quipped back, "That's not a geo-trail, that's a freeway."

As noted above, lots of people come and find this cache. One of my good caching friends was visiting her sister in Colorado just days earlier and had taken a road trip out to Mingo. In most cases, if you knew that another cache from your area had been to a particular cache that you were going to find, you'd make a note of it and try to find their signature on the logbook. We arrived only two days after my friend, yet a dozen signatures separated our two signatures. Like I said, it's a popular destination for geocachers.

It also changes form from time to tie. As you can see from the photo, the cache, when we found it, was a very large PVC pipe. Two weeks later it was a black container. I have no idea why people keep taking the container, mainly because it's not the original container, but it's constantly changing. Sigh.

We spent the night in Colby, Kansas and then took off for New Mexico in the morning, traveling through 5 states in a day. It was probably not the most efficient driving day, but from a geocaching standpoint, it was a lot of fun. Stay tuned to find out.