Enjoying the HIGH Life

I want to travel to as many places as I can where the elevation is 10,000 feet or greater. Intermediate caches below that are ok but if I am placed in a cache above 10,000 feet, please list that altitude in the log. Thanks!!!

IF YOU HAVE FOUND THE PROXY, PLEASE CONTACY ME ASAP!

On the 5^th of February, 2006 I placed an inconspicuous geo-coin in GCJVWK aka “The Cabin”. As the elevation of this cache was 10,600 feet ASL (Above Sea Level) I called the coin “Enjoying the High Life” with the task of visiting caches with an elevation of 10,000 feet ASL or higher. It is here that the adventure begins. It visited a few places in New Mexico before travelling to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arkansas, Texas, and finally to Washington where it was hoping to be taken at least near Mt Rainier for a possible ascent. There was some confusion as to if it was or wasn’t in a particular cache in the area but was eventually retrieved on 6 June 2011. This was the last I would hear from/of the original coin. For a while.

I messaged the last known person to see “Enjoying the High Life” many times to see if I could get an update on it’s possible movements since it had been in their possession for so long. Eventually, it was (apparently) still showing up in a cache list and on 17 July 2011 another cacher marked it as ‘Missing’. The coin had been travelling for 5 years, 4 months, and 1 day. I never did get any response from the cacher that had last seen it and eventually decided it was time to try something new.

So, I decided to create a proxy coin (thanks to GCProxy.com) and set it loose to continue the adventure. This proxy was released into the wilds on 9 November 2013. Yes, I tried for nearly 2 years and 4 months to recover the original. This time, “Enjoying the High Life” travelled from Oklahoma to Colorado, New Jersey, Iceland, Germany, and Belgium where it to seemed to fall into oblivion. It was last ‘seen’ on 21 January 2017 near Antwerp. The proxy had traveled for 3 years, 2 months, and 13 days. Again, I was persistent and tried to track the proxy down but on 15 January 2018 (after nearly a year), I declared it missing for the last time. Or had I?

In the evening of the 4 April 2018 I received a message from a cacher visiting the west coast of the US from Germany! He informed me that he had the ORIGINAL coin! I was excited to hear this but was a bit skeptical. I quickly messaged to confirm and was sent a picture. Of the original coin!! It looked pretty ragged but still serviceable and ready to go back out into the wild! It had been 6 years, 10 months, and 1 day since a log had been posted with positive contact with the coin! That wonderful person had apparently inherited a stash of trackables (60 I was told) from another cacher who no longer participated and was in the process of contacting owners ahead of taking them to Geocaching HQ. There were a lot of happy cachers all over I am sure!

When it was re-released, between the original and the proxy, it had traveled over 22,000 miles!!! Let’s see how many more it can get now!!!