Watch the first Geocaching.com Presents video from Germany. Join a group of German geocachers as they explore an abandoned Lost Place Cache that thousands of soldiers used to call home. Lost Place Caches take geocachers to a location that has been all but forgotten by the modern world. Follow along as geocachers search a decommissioned Soviet military base to log a smiley on a difficulty 3.5, terrain 3.5 Multi-Cache. The cache, Stadt im Wald, is located in what used to be East Germany.
"Stadt im Wald" Lost Place Cache
The video is spoken entirely in German. Click the CC button for English or German subtitles.
The next Geocaching.com Presents video from Germany is scheduled to post on August 11th. Go behind the scenes with the German geocaching bloggers and musical talent (they even have their own geocaching CD) known as Dosenfischer.
"Stadt im Wald" Lost Place Cache
Sehe das erste „Geocaching.com Presents“ Video aus Deutschland. Schließ dich der Gruppe von deutschen Geocachern an, als sie einen Lost Place, der sie zur einer ehemaligen sowjetischen Militärbasis führt, erforschen. Das Video ist komplett in deutscher Sprache.
Klicke auf die CC-Taste für die englischen oder deutschen Untertiteln. Das nächste „Geocaching.com Presents“ Video aus Deutschland soll am 11. August veröffentlicht werden. Blicke hinter die Kulissen mit den deutschen Geocaching Bloggers und dem musikalischen Talent (sie haben ihre eigenen Geocaching CD), das als Dosenfischer bekannt ist.
The view from near "Klettersteig Mürren - Gimmelwald"
This emoticon is used often on the Klettersteig Mürren – Gimmelwald (GC1DDQ5) cache page. Here’s why. The traditional cache involves an extreme form of mountain climbing. Its earned it’s terrain five rating with a breath-taking climb up sheer cliffs and nail-biting crossings on wire thin suspension bridges. The cache is not for the faint of heart.
Still more than 55 brave geocachers earned the smiley emoticon for logging the Swiss cache. The geocache has also earned 10 Favorite Points. Spaki placed the cache in 2008.
The pictures posted to the cache page tell the story. Geocachers with only a metal step between them and hundreds of feet of thin air. Safety does come first, especially while climbing. Mandatory equipment for the cache includes a climbing helmet, climbing harness, climbing set specially designed for via ferratas (sling with 2 carabiner hooks).
On the way to Traveling to the cache site
Continue your exploration of some of the most engaging geocaches from around the world. Explore all the Geocaches of the Week on our blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com.
Darcy Kydd, KaliKydd, describes July 3 as, “A pretty awesome day.” The sunny Vancouver Island, British Columbia day involved the outdoors, geocaching and a daredevil helicopter ride to claim a First to Find (FTF).
Vancouver Island is home to a skilled geocacher named ceebeecee. He has tallied more than 600 FTFs. But there was one new Vancouver Island area geocache that lingered without a FTF for weeks. There was a reason.
The traditional geocache, Mt Shepherd (GC2Y4FK), is a difficulty two, terrain five cache. It’s hidden at the top of an island mountain off the Western coast of Canada. Cachers on Vancouver Island would typically need to take a two ferries, drive a four-wheel drive vehicle up the mountain and then hike steep terrain for hours.
Then inspiration struck geocacher Aranea Van Burik, part of the geocaching team Coombs Wooden Shoe. On July 3, Aranea posted a simple question on the “Geocaching on Vancouver Island” Facebook page. The post read, “HELI CACHING!! DOES ANYBODY WANT TO GO?” The post had a link to the Mt Shepherd geocache. Less then a minute later Darcy responded, “YES!”
Location of Mt. Shepherd cache
Darcy says, “This wasn’t really in the budget, but it was the chance of the lifetime and couldn’t really pass it up.” Soon, Mike, the other half of Aranea’s caching team Coombs Wooden Shoe, and WossVegas joined.The three geocachers called themselves “Team Nuts.” They had never met in person before this cache. The helicopter was booked for the next day.
Aranea wasn’t able to take the flight but says, “The next day or so was nerve wracking, because I sent out the above notice also to ceebeecee, the FTF hound. He now knew what we were up to, so now the race was on! It turns out that Darcy has her own thing going on with ceebeecee and FTF’s, so I didn’t need to tell her what was at stake here. We kept checking the cache page obsessively and continually to see if he had logged it or not. WE WANTED THAT FTF!”
Darcy has been geocaching since 2007 but nothing on the scale of they were about to attempt. She says, “I like to get out in the bush, and out in the mountain and up in trees. The more forest the better, and normally my dogs are with me, but they couldn’t come in the helicopter.”
Team Nuts: WossVegas, pilot Mike, Coombs Wooden Shoe and KaliKydd
Dogs on the ground, the plan to snag a FTF was close to literally lifting off. First the team listened to a safety briefing, and then waited for cloud cover to lift from Mt. Shepherd.
The helicopter eventually got the green light to take flight. What would have been a five hour cache run was reduced to a leisurely ride through the clouds.
The helicopter touched down within 30 meters of the cache. Aranea was listening to the radio chatter when she got the news, “When they radioed back saying that they found it and it was a FTF….I did a happy dance…”
Darcy thanked ceebeecee for being a good sport and wrote in her cache log, “Our cheeks will hurt for weeks from the grins on our faces… Seriously, thanks to everyone for an amazing day!” In the log book for the terrain 5 cache she wrote, ““Quick, easy, find.”
She took this video of the flight as the helicopter was about to lift off.
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WossVegas logged, “Fanfreakingtastic! Found as part of “Team Nuts” with Coombs Wooden Shoe and KaliKydd. What a day! Nice little stroll from the chopper, admired the view, scanned the slopes to see if ceebeecee was closing in, signed the log, snapped photos and loved every minute of it.” Team Nuts claimed the FTF and took a victory tour of the island by helicopter. Darcy shot this video of this flight into the cache.
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Darcy’s advice for anyone interested in helicopter caching is simple. She says, “Find a pilot that’s willing.” And Team Nuts’ pilot might be one of the newest geocachers. Darcy says, “It was his very first cache. He did log the find, and might sign up for an account on Geocaching.com.”
Aranea says she’s ready for the next FTF challenge, ” We go for a FTF at any time, you name it…middle of the night, yup, no problem. We are in! I bought a 20 million candle powered flashlight just for the occasion. This puppy lights up the moon. Anybody that sees this thing asks if I needed to register it with NASA. So I am ready for the next challenge, whatever that might be! I can hardly wait!”
Geocachers are forming a team to track down missing knights in the United Kingdom. The Langley Knights Competition puts a cash award of up to £11,000, social media clout and worldwide prestige for the geocaching community on the line. The game plays a form of hide-and-seek that geocachers know well. Just imagine this as a quest to be on the team with the most “first to finds.” Hundreds of teams are expected to compete to find the most knights.
Will you answer the call to be part of the geocaching team? Click here to join the geocaching team and recruit your friends and family to help increase the odds of winning the competition. Team members must be recruited by July 1.
Here are the details. Five knights are being hidden around the U.K. beginning on July 2. Three knights will be real physical knights. They’ll be found in full armor in actual parks with their winning code number. Two of the knights will be virtual knights. Geocachers anywhere in the world can search for photos of the knights on Google Maps or Google Earth to find their winning codes. The “cyber knights” will appear as a photo in or near parks in the U.K.
Photos of all five knights will be released on July 2 at 9 am British Summer Time. If all the knights are not found in the first day clues will be provided several times a day, each subsequent day. If you are the first to find a knight, you receive a £1000 reward. The person who recruited you gets £500, and the person who recruited them receives £250. Any winnings directed to Groundspeak will be donated to charity. We are open to suggestions as to which charity this should be.
More information about the Langley Knights Competition can be found here. Join the Geocaching team and recruit friends using this URL: http://bitly.com/cachersuknight
This isn’t the first time geocachers competed in a timed social media challenge. Groundspeak Geocachers came in fifth out of more than 50 teams in the DARPA Network Challenge in 2009. The Langley Knight Competition was inspired by the DARPA Challenge.
Follow this blog post for the latest on the Langley Knight Competition and the success of the geocaching team. Good luck!
Chris Brown’s (1Delta10Tango) geocaching accomplishments can be measured by the mile. There’s a 20 mile swath of land around his rural Oregon home where, he says, he’s found nearly every geocache. A geocache is published, Chris finds it. It’s a system. But a recent search turned up an extreme cache that he hadn’t found. The cache was hidden in an old gold mine and only one geocacher had logged the find since the difficulty four, terrain five geocache was published in 2009.
1Delta10Tango cave caching
Chris and a group of local geocachers were about to set off on a geocaching adventure that would twist them through cave openings little larger then rabbit holes. The adventure would leave them rain soaked, mud covered and in awe. In typical geocacher fashion Chris calls the experience, “truly one of the most fun and exciting caches that we had ever done.”
The search for “In the MIDDLE of nowhere” (GC1XK83) began with a phone call. Chris says, “I called my geocaching buddies Team Mazda and Ladybug97470 and said we have to go for this one there has only been one finder and it has sat for almost a year.”
On the way to the cache the rain started. Chris says, “After about a 30 minute drive we arrived at our destination, the rain was falling at a steady pace and was enough to soak through our coats.” He says they did a quick safety check and, “We found a spot to park and after gearing up with flashlights, extra batteries, a few items of SWAG and our GPS we set off down the side of the mountain.”
The coordinates took them deep in the brush to a steep hillside. Chris says, “We arrived at the spot where we had to crawl into the opening of an abandoned gold mine. We all looked at each other water dripping from our faces. Chris asked, “Who is going to be Alice first?”
Crawling through the rough dirt hole, Chris says the geocachers entered another world lit only by their flashlights. Chris says,“There was no White Rabbit, Mad Hatter or Cheshire Cat in this Wonderland but there was years of preserved history just waiting for people to find it.” The mine looked very much like it did more than a hundred years before.
Inside the “rabbit hole”
“We looked around amazed at what we had found. We could still see the marks in the rock from pick axes that had chiseled their way through so many years ago. It was one of the neatest places I have ever been. After looking around for a minute we decide to begin our search without any info on what we were looking for or where we would find it.”
The cache wasn’t far. “With a little searching around we managed to come up with the cache. After a few minutes of looking through the SWAG and deciding what each of us would get, we divided it up and left our own SWAG for the next seeker.”
But the team left with more than SWAG. They had an experience for a lifetime: “With a smile on all our faces we walked back down the dark corridors, back to where we started this fun and exciting venture.”
Chris hopes his story will inspire others to try more challenging caches (while taking necessary safety precautions). Chris says he is “hopeful that one day others will try this quest and get the self satisfaction of a job well done.”
is used often on the Klettersteig Mürren – Gimmelwald (
emoticon for logging the Swiss cache. The geocache has also earned 10 Favorite Points. 
