GC16 - Day 4 of last year's August road trip.

This is a continuation of a series of entries detailing my trip to Oregon from last August. First off know that this is going to be about geocaching, so if you're not interested, then please feel free to skip this. 

The main part of this road trip was to get GC16 and GC17, which are some of the oldest geocaches in Oregon, having been hidden back in June 2000 and July 2000. I wanted to find these two caches because they would fill in my Jasmer calendar. The Jasmer calendar is finding a cache that was hidden in every month since geocaching started in May 2000. Because some of these older caches are close to 25 years old, they are getting fewer and far between. In fact, there are only 4 caches left in the entire world that were hidden in August 2000 - one in Utah (which I have found), one in Michigan, one in Georgia and one in Sweden I believe. And the one in Michigan is threatened because logging increasingly gets closer to where it's hidden.

Most of these older caches usually involve hikes and this one was no exception. Google maps was a lifesaver. I had intel about where to park for GC16, so I inputted that and away I went. I literally couldn't tell you how I got there outside of Google took me right where I needed to go. Once there, I parked the car, loaded up the daypack and headed up the trail. I ended up finding a couple of other caches on the way up to GC16 and after finding those, I kept going up the trail and finally found a side trail that I was looking for that would take me to this venerable cache.

The path was narrow on both sides with ferns and they had a lot of water on them, so by the time I was done getting to the cache, my pants were pretty much soaked, but as you can see from my expression, I really didn't care, because I'd marked off another month on my Jasmer calendar and only had to find a cache hidden in July 2000 to fully complete the calendar. That would happen tomorrow. 

As far as the actual cache was concerned, it was a fairly easy find, but then again, most caches hidden back then were fairly easy. It was the experience of the hike, getting out in nature that were the important things. People hid a cache on "their" trail and geocaching was the way people got to explore other trails in their area that they might not be familiar with and this one was no exception. You can see by the size of the lid that it was a rather large container and it was just hidden down in a tree stump. Most people hiking on that particular trail wouldn't even give this particular stump, or that side trail the time of day because the trail didn't lead anywhere, the stump was just a stump. But to me there was something special there, something that I wanted to find.

After signing the log sheet, I replaced the cache as I had found it and then started my half mile trek back down the trail to my car where further geocaching adventures awaited me later in the day. I'll write about those in a later post.