Day Two: The Original Stash

Today was all about caching. Our goal was to find the second stage of our trifecta: GCGV0P – Original Stash Tribute Plaque.

First a little history lession for those who don’t know. The Global Positioning System (GPS) was originally used primarily for US military applications. Civilian GPS recievers did exist, but the signals they received where intentionally degraded using a feature called Selective Availability. The relatively low accuracy would have made a game like Geocaching virtually impossible, not to mention turn-by-turn navigation and many other location-based features of today’s smartphones that we take for granted. But pressure started to mount to turn off selective availablity, and the proverbial switch was flipped off on May 1, 2000.

The GPS Stash Hunt began almost immediately after; the first ever stash was hidden just outside Portland, Oregon on May 3, 2000. Several other stashes started popping up across the US and the world. It wasn’t long before participants realized the game needed a better name, so it soon became known as Geocaching. And while that original cache didn’t last that long, some geocachers recognized the importance of honoring where our game began. So they worked together to place a plaque at the location of that first stash, and it’s become a very popular place for cachers to visit.

Now the original stash is more than a three hour drive from our accommodations in Seattle, so we knew it was going to be a full day adventure. To break things up, I spent time last night and this morning planning out a route that would allow us to get some highly favorited caches to find without going very far off our route. I eventually picked out 10 targets to find along the way and expected we would get several more in the area of our destination.

The trip started with one of our longest drives of the day before we stopped outside a Cabella’s for GC961WA – Go Fish! A well-crafted gadget cache that required fishing for numbers to open a combination lock. With that cache completed, we decided to stop into the store to go to the restroom and wound up doing some shopping, too. So much for our schedule…

A few caches later, we hit another highlight of the day: GC57ZJR – Johnny Islands Throne Room. The cache owner requests people not to include photos in their logs, so we didn’t really know what to expect. But with nearly 1,000 favorite points at an 85% clip, we knew it was going to be something good. The cache is actually inside the fence for a pet/garden center, and it soon became obvious why. We rounded the corner of the building to see a full size port-a-potty with a padlock on the door. Getting inside and getting to the log was an adventure that is difficult to describe. There’s a monitor inside that starts playing a video about trying to launch a port-a-potty into the air with rockets! All to give a vehicle for conveying more numbers to open a second locked space – the waste compartment – which contains the log. Who comes up with this stuff?

On the outskirts of Vancouver, we came to GC5RCB5 – Pinball Wizard. It wasn’t much to look at it, but it was fun taking turns using a pinball plunger to launch the small container out of a PVC pipe. We also did a few well-designed multi caches in this area before we finally crossed over into Oregon.

After a few more caches in Portland (they were fine, but not great), we were onto the final approach. As the roads got slower and more winding, Amber and the girls opted to close their eyes to avoid any potential for feeling sick, so I sort of had the last few minutes of the drive to myself. We arrived on the scene about 5:30pm, which was a few hours later than we’d originally hoped, but not so late it was a problem. There was a pair of cachers just leaving the area who gave us tips about where to find the ammo can for the original stash as well as Un-Original Stash (GC92) placed after the original original stash was destroyed. A few other people arrived while we were still onsite, including an older couple from Iowa and a pair of Aussies. It’s amazing how this game can bring so many people from all over the world to one random location on earth!