The Cache is NOT located at the posted Coordinates. Please note that the Swimming Pool is Private Property. Do NOT enter the property. It is owned by a Family who is working hard to restore the Pool. We wish them success so that we can hopefully come back and swim here some day!

The posted Coordinates are at the historic Redings Mill Swimming Pool. Walk a little to the west and look into the fence to see the neat old swimming pool.

Redings Mill Swimming Pool was the granddaddy of them all. Ask anyone who grew up in Joplin decades ago about going to the pool in the summer and you’re likely to hear about the pool at Redings Mill.

Swimming pools have an interesting history. The country’s first municipal pools were apparently constructed to get rowdy, scantily clad youths out of the rivers and lakes and away from the public eye. They also served as large bathtubs for poor and immigrant neighborhoods.

Pools originally were melting pots where people of all ethnic backgrounds interacted. Men and women, however, swam on separate days! Those dynamics changed after World War I when pools went from bathtubs to leisure destinations—the pool no longer was designed to promote cleanliness but to provide a place to socialize. And, unfortunately, for some segments of the population, they were no longer such melting pots.

Municipal pools were very popular during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. And, although swimsuits shrank in size through the years, some city pools were as large as football fields.

The pool at Redings Mill was certainly in this “bigger is better” category. And to say the water, fed from a spring, was cold was an understatement as large as the pool’s proportions. There must not have been much chlorination in those days — except for the little pools of disinfectant we had to wade through to get from the dressing rooms to the pool — because it seemed that the water was changed weekly. (On Thursdays, as I remember.) So, Fridays brought out only the most serious swimmers and divers, and for those of us who didn’t want to bob up and down like popsicles in the frigid water, serious sunning on the pool’s large deck.

Here it is the year I was born, 1976.

The pool at Redings Mill eventually closed and later housed an upscale restaurant. Today it sits empty :(

Anyways.... Now that You have seen the pool, Let's go find that Geocache!

From the posted coordinates, you need to travel:

1,475 feet at a heading of 132.80 degrees.

Got it?

The cache container is located in the public Right-of-way.

Have fun!

Congratulations to Topgun5403 & Co-Pilot Marty for First To Find!