In the dark for a long time

Most of my geocaching friends have already seen this on several of the geocaching Facebook pages, but I thought I'd share this with the rest of you since I think you'll get a kick out of this. Then again, maybe you won't and you'll just roll your eyes and that's OK too.

A couple of weeks ago, I went geocaching with some friends in the Redlands area, east of where I live. We were looking for a newly published geocache and were kind of perplexed when we couldn't find it right away since there was only one obvious spot for it to be. Reading through the past logs of previous finders didn't help either, so we decided to expand our search radius out to see if the coordinates were a little off.

I wasn't sure this would help since not any of the other previous finders had mentioned the coordinates being off, but we decided to check out the other spots anyway. At one of the spots we checked, we found a small container, totally encrusted with spider webs. Hey, there's the cache.

Upon opening the cache, we knew that we hadn't found the cache we were looking for, but a different cache. From the photo you can see dates from 2007.  What the heck? We signed our names on the log sheet and replaced the cache.

I went home and started investigating. Yes, I'm guilty of this as much has everyone else is, but we were fortunate that we had some distinct signatures as well as dates when they found the cache. It didn't take too much sleuthing to figure out that this was an old archived cache that the owner had never picked up after archiving it. 

We later got confirmation from the owner of the newly published cache that her cache was missing, so we knew this one was the old one. We found the cache page on line and all three of us logged the old archived cache. This might seem like much, but it's pretty cool to think that the container has been sitting there for 17+ years just waiting for someone else to find it.