We want to highlight a fun, car-themed geocache that was hidden by a Ranger in Petrified Forest National Park. Besides, what’s more American than a road trip on Route 66?
Made popular by the Nat King Cole Trio song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and the 1960’s TV Series, Route 66, the road spans from Santa Monica, California to Chicago, Illinois. Along Route 66, you can visit Petrified Forest National Park, which was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Petrified Forest National Park was created to protect large deposits of petrified wood and other fossils from the Triassic Period, which makes this park Dino-Mite! Over 10,000 years of human history can be found in the park, including over 800 archeological and historical sites.
Things to know about the geocache:
There is an old car sitting in the roadbed of the previous road.
This place is a popular spot to visit, so watch out for muggles taking pictures!
This is a “TNLN” geocache, which means “Take Nothing; Leave Nothing”. Bring a pen, sign the log, and save your cool swag and trackables for a different geocaching experience.
Please respect the rules and regulations of the park and the resources it was established to protect.
While you’re in Petrified National Forest, check out other caches the PEFO Ranger has hidden:
Thanks PEFO Ranger for hiding some super fun and informative caches and also for serving our National Park Service.
And I’ll leave you with a seemingly relevant dinosaur joke:
What do you call it when a dinosaur has a car accident?
A Tyrannosaurus wreck!
Make sure to share your experience with the community by using the hashtags #FindYourPark and #Geocaching while on your National Parks adventure this weekend.
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world.
Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog. If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
This week, we’re recognizing a creative geocache in a country that just got its first souvenir: Turkey!
Birdhouses, or Kuş Evleri in Turkish, are literally built into much of the Ottoman architecture in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey. This geocache was placed in tribute to those birdhouses.
“Kuş Evi / Bird House” is a tree-climbing cache, the first of its kind in Turkey, in fact. Finding it qualifies you to add a special banner to your profile. Starting this week, you’ll also earn the brand-new Turkey souvenir for finding this, or any other geocache, in Turkey.
What geocachers have to say about it:
“This cache was my main target this afternoon: I like tree-climbing and I like banners . This one combined both. At least after I had found it! There were quite a few people around, thus I had to look carefully. After a looooong while I found a short trail and the tree. Getting to the cache was no problem but then there was the locking system that needed to be overcome. It wasn’t too difficult but something new to me! I really liked it! This whole cache is definitely worth a favourite point! Greetings to the owner! TFTC!” –kinderarzt
“I wanted this one to be my 300. cache, so i saved itaccordingly during our Kuzguncuk tour. I have bern listening to the praises of this cache for months. I found some bird house caches in Europe before but i encounter one with a puzzle for the first time. Initially, my wife went up the tree. But when she had some difficulties with opening the lock, we switched places. I also could not open it immediately. The numbers must be aligned precisely to open it. I didn’t have a magnet with me but a swiss army knife. The rest eas not so difficult. And for sure, it deserves a fav point.” –blastrula
What the Cache Owner has to say about it:
Tell us a little bit about why you decided to hide this cache? “There were not many handcrafted caches in Turkey or Istanbul. I saw a lot of nice, maker caches in the web and want to make one myself. It should be not to difficult but should have some field puzzle elements in it. And it should be a example of handcrafted caches for the growing community in Istanbul.”
There don’t seem to be many tree caches in Turkey. Do you know if yours was the first? “I am very sure it is. It is a tree cache where searchers have not to use technical equipment, but have to climb nearly 3 meters high. Today there are more caches in Turkey like this.”
Do you think this cache requires more maintenance that your other geocaches? “No the place is more secure than the other caches in the city. Also it is chained to the tree, so Muggles are less a problem.”
Do you have anything in particular you’d like to say to the geocaching community? “I produced this and some other caches in Istanbul to show the community that nice crafted caches are more fun than simple ones.”
Photos:
The making of the cache.
Intrepid geocachers in an attempt to disguise themselves as monkeys.
The puzzle box that contains the cache.
The cache itself.
The littlest geocachers may need some help finding this one.
View from the cache.
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world. Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog.
If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
Boom-and-bust desert ghost towns are not an exclusive trademark of the American west. The site of this EarthCache is a ghost town at the edge of a Namibian desert. The town’s name is Kolmanskop.
In 1908, Namibia was a German colony called South-West Africa. That year, a German man named Zacharias Lewela found a diamond while working on a railway line. Lewela’s lucky find sparked a frantic diamond rush, with floods of diamond hunters arriving and settling in the area, and naming it Kolmanskop.
The town was quickly built up by its residents, with a distinctly German architectural style. At its pinnacle in the 1920’s, Kolmanksop was home to about 700 families, and its amenities and institutions included a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theater, gym and swimming pool, a casino, an ice factory and the first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere. That was the boom.
The bust came after World War I. The diamond fields of Kolmanskop had been milked for all they were worth, and diamond mining in other areas created competition. By 1954 the town was completely abandoned.
Over time, the geological forces of the desert filled the remaining buildings with heaps of sand, blasting brightly colored paint from walls and scouring roofs. Now, visitors who want to see the eerie sights for themselves can take a tour of the town. The company that runs the tours has restored a few of the buildings to their historical looks. But most of the leftover buildings have been left to fill slowly, but surely, with sand.
What geocachers have to say:
“Hat mich irgendwie an Arizona erinnert wo es auch Ghosttowns gibt. Nur waren es hier keinen Diamanten sondern Gold. Absolut sehenswert. Vielen Dank für den Earthcache. Natürlich ein Schleifchen von uns.” Reminded me a little bit of Arizona, which also has ghost towns. Except here, of course, it wasn’t gold, but diamonds. Absolutely worth visiting. Thank you very much for this EarthCache. Of course it gets a favorite point from us. b012887
“Great area, easily the coolest Lost Place we have ever been! Thanx go out to the owner, that did a great job at creating this wonderful esrth cache. The questions involved, brought us to think even further about our experience at Kolmanskuppe. If you’re in town, this is the definite must do and the Cache as well! Thank you very much and greetings from germany!” John Milton
Photos:
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world. Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog. If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
This geocache is the kind that brings you to a place you would probably never have otherwise heard of or visited. Set deep into a forest on Slovenia’s northern border, this multi-cache will take you on a hike in the woods past old mining artifacts, culminating in an old manganese mine dating back to the 19th century.
The mine itself is still accessible via two entrances — but use caution. And if you’re not comfortable going inside the tunnel, there’s plenty of lovely nature to explore nearby. Plus, if you find this cache, or any cache in Slovenia, you’ll earn a shiny new Slovenia country souvenir.
This cache was the first to be awarded the Geocache of the Month award by the Slovenian Geocaching Club.
What the cache owner has to say:
What sorts of things will a geocacher find while on this multi-cache tour? On the beginning of the path, you can see water slide between the two dams and an interesting springs of the stream Javornik. At the upper dam on the information board find the coordinates of the manganese mine. Do not forget to look the ore below an information board on the entry of the 200 year old manganese ore mine.
Why did you want to bring people to this location? Beautiful nature, walking in silence, without other visitors. Historic mine in which it is still possible to enter, but only a few – 10m.
What can you tell us about the history of the manganese mine? This mine was just one of many manganese mines in Slovenia. Manganese ores were processed in Jesenice ironworks. From this ore it was in Jesenice ironworks under the leadership of ing. Lambert PANTZ in 1872 that, for the first time (in the world), that blast furnace was used to produce manganese iron. The Industrial Company Kranj was awarded with the gold medal for extraordinary innovation at a global industry exhibition in Pennsylvania on the hundredth anniversary of the United States.
Photos:
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world. Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog. If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
“Born” is a real-time adventure geocache, one of several such caches in Germany. The cache page (which is in German) sets the scene for this adventure (all a hypothetical scenario): The Federal Criminal Police Office has learned that a bombing is imminent in the city of Göttingen. Special Unit “Gänseliesel” has been summoned to begin the investigation. Chief Commissioner Schönbeck has been appointed to lead the unit. So far, the investigation has revealed that the bombs have been placed in Göttingen and are already on a countdown. The clock is ticking.
This D5/T4 geocache cannot be found alone. In fact, you’ll need 10-20 geocachers split into three teams in order to have a chance of finding it. One team stays at “Headquarters”: a location of their choosing, preferably filled with snacks. The other two teams are sent to 45 different locations around the city. At every location there’s a countdown, and all three teams are given a question/puzzle to solve.
According to the cache owners, “The teams in the city have to use the public transport to get to the locations in time and answer questions about historical or famous places in Göttingen. The team in the headquarter must deal with encryption, picture analysis, internet-research, maps and bus-timetables.”
If all three teams solve their puzzles and submit their answers before the clock runs out, they continue on to the next task. This continues until the investigation is concluded and Göttingen is saved when the bomb is diffused. In total, each team is working non-stop for five hours. The moving teams will cover about 45 km throughout the evening, and eventually reach the center of the city. The CO says, “At the end, all three teams get to know where the geocache is hidden and move together to sign the logbook. Some teams even bring a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate the successful search.”
The T4 rating is well-earned. That’s all we’ll say here, but check out the photos below for more about this amazing cache.
What the Cache Owner has to say:
How often are the teams unable to “defuse the bomb” in time? “If your team starts the hunt for the geocache BORN, you never know if you are succsessfull. If one team is not able to reach the destination in the timelimit, the team in the headquarter cannot give the right answer. The investigation stops and the team must start another time. There ist always a tense between physical effort and moments of happiness on the one side and disappointment if you fail a task. Even though the geocache is difficult D5, some teams get it on the first attempt. Every second teams has to start a second time from a backup-point and only a few teams fail more often.”
How long did it take you to develop this cache? “The idea was created in Summer ’14. First we both made a list of locations in Göttingen that are interesting, then Hatti and I spend two days on bikes in Göttingen to visit all this places and take photos of the question-to-answer-stations. Then i took a bus map and planned two routes with basecamp that touch a lot of the interesting places. Meanwhile I develloped the homepage with all the functions you need to play this timed cache and manage teams and so on…
The biggest part of work was to invent a story to connect the 26 chapters of the cache and find 3 x 26 tasks to occupy the three groups. When all was done we two played both outside-routes in realtime to check if the calculated times are ok to get to know what the cache will look like for the teams. The last step was a beta-test with a little group of geocachers to test the complete cache. On January the first, the cache was published. I think the cache was surely over 50 hours of planning, phoning, riding in Göttingen…”
Is there anything you would like to say to the Geocaching community? “We love to invite you to come to Göttingen to find BORN or our brand-new spin-off ALERT (GC5RRQF). We want you to have a gread time and wish you that you are doing the great experience what it’s like when teamwork succeeds. We have read all the amazing logs on our geocaches and thank for every feedback. Göttingen is an interesting city and you can discover it from a completely different side, if you hurry through the streets with the ticking clock in your neck. It was a hard job to concept our two geocaches, but the feedback from the community is great.”
Photos:
You know it’s a cool cache when it has its own logo.
Unit Headquarters often look like this…
Or this…
Or this.
Find “Born” and you might end up doing this.
One of the stops along the way, perhaps?
Another stop along for the outside teams.
This team eventually found success.Smiling (and weary) faces after completing the investigation.
Those who reach this cache know ultimate geocaching success.
Continue to explore some of the most amazing geocaches around the world. Check out all of the Geocaches of the Week on the Geocaching blog. If you would like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, fill out this form.
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