Other Than The Bomb Squad

[+Douglas_Clan]

No simple muggle stories please.

[+Stunod]

Interesting question, but better suited for the Geocaching Topics forum than Off Topic.

 

Moving thread...

[+ibycus]

While not exactly vanished yet, one of my caches (Fatigued on Indefatigable) has apparently been moved by a well meaning hiker. My guess is that it has been mistaken for a summit log (it was about 115m from the summit). Funny thing is, its seen more traffic as a summit log than it has as a geocache. Only problem is, now I have to either

 

a) hike back up there and find the right coordinates

hope the next cacher is kind enough to search for a little while to find the cache, and give me some good numbers.

 

Guess I should have put "Do not move" in bigger letters on the outside...

[+Renegade Knight]

Prybar, whoops that's a muggle story. Sorry. All I've got is muggles though I know of a Squirrel that stole a cache once. He got tired of it and threw it back after he chewed it up.

[+chris-mouse]

I had one cache removed by a backhoe. It was placed in a nice safe location, in an area that had been re landscaped only the previous year.

The cache was fine for a while, but then the landowner put up a new building nearby. That construction didn't affect the cache directly, although I kept an eye on it. Then they went and hooked up the electrical power to the building. Seems that my cache was directly in the path of the new electrical cables, and the cache was destroyed in the process of digging a trench.

 

I replaced the cache in a new location, where I thought it would be perfectly safe. I just got a note from a local cacher saying that the cache has recently been covered over by a layer of new sod. Looks like I'll need to fix that soon so as to not run afooul of the 'no burial' rule.

[+beopots]

I had one cache removed by a backhoe. It was placed in a nice safe location, in an area that had been re landscaped only the previous year.

The cache was fine for a while, but then the landowner put up a new building nearby. That construction didn't affect the cache directly, although I kept an eye on it. Then they went and hooked up the electrical power to the building. Seems that my cache was directly in the path of the new electrical cables, and the cache was destroyed in the process of digging a trench.

 

I replaced the cache in a new location, where I thought it would be perfectly safe. I just got a note from a local cacher saying that the cache has recently been covered over by a layer of new sod. Looks like I'll need to fix that soon so as to not run afooul of the 'no burial' rule.

Our first cache was similar; We placed it in a park, it was fairly new, but we thought most of the work was done, apparently not. It was placed by a culvert under a tree, the tree came up missing and so did the cache..... *sigh*

and now there's another cache about 50 feet away, so there's no possibility of brining it back from the dead.

The most suprising thing was the time of year, here in utah very little construction work usually gets done in the fall/winter especially landscaping. We tried to find it with a metal detector where the tree used to be, but alas, he is no more.

[+welch]

since my caches are not lojack equipped all I got is speculation.

[+Team Perks]

Once a cacher took one of my caches home, because they thought it was a neat object but didn't realize it was the cache...

[+mtn-man]

Here in West Atlanta, the recent hurricane Dennis drooped about 9 inches of rain in 30 or so hours. I had one of my caches near a creek by a hiking/biking trail near my home. It is a trail that spurs off of our long "rails to trails" trail. I did a multi with the first coords very near the parking lot you use. The final is down the trail and pretty far off trail up a slight hill. When I placed it there I figured I had it over the potential basin area of this creek. The creek is about 12 feet wide and a couple of feet deep or so.

 

Normally that is.

 

I took a back way to check the final. It is gone. It looks like water got to about 2 feet high there, but it did not have much force. Downed trees have been moved a bit, but only got so far. There is not much debris stacked up either, as if the water just rose and eddy'd up there and then fell within a matter of hours. I would estimate that the creek got about 12 feet above its normal flow and about 8 feet over the bike trail. The cache may still be out there hung up somewhere since there did not appear to be a heavy flow in that area. I'm going to scout it out when I am bored. This area was something of a "pool" area for a bridge about a quarter of a mile down river. Beyond the bridge the damage is pretty amazing. Water blew out of the other side of the bridge and then down to the old train trestle for the rail/trail another quarter of a mile downstream from that same bridge. My tag near that trestle probably survived believe it or not, but the area below the trestle is now closed as they inspect and repair damage and clean up that part of the spur trail.

 

I never thought the water would get that high. Some of the other things around here have been unreal as far as damage as well. My little ammo box is nothing compared to the losses suffered by some.

 

That makes my second river induced 5 star multi-cache.

I'll give a LTF* prize to anyone who finds it!

 

*last to find

[+StarBrand]

I have one that I placed on a hillside near a roadside parking area. Thought it would be safe but a few months later they came along and scrapped the hill about 40 foot back to increase the parking area. All the dirt from the project was dumped in a nearby pile - I am sure the cache is somewhere in there about 10 foot down. I replaced the cache - higher up the hill by a fence line.

[+Bear Paughs]

Not a cache I own, but the very first one we looked for (and DNF'd) was the victim of a rockslide and is buried somewhere under tons of concrete slabs.

[+Team Neos]

Not a cache that I own, but one I did was on a statue near the visitor center in town. Not long after we found it, I saw this log:

 

It's gone!! If in fact the cache was in the statue...(I never did find this one)...then the cache is no longer here. I stopped by to give a second chance at it, and there's suddenly a bare spot that was once filled with a sculpture.

 

The statue was moved to a new location, about twenty feet from an exiting cache.

 

[edited to make sense!]

Edited July 20, 2005 by Team Neos

[+mtn-man]

I have one that I placed on a hillside near a roadside parking area. Thought it would be safe but a few months later they came along and scrapped the hill about 40 foot back to increase the parking area. All the dirt from the project was dumped in a nearby pile - I am sure the cache is somewhere in there about 10 foot down. I replaced the cache - higher up the hill by a fence line.

Oh man, I forgot. That happened to me too when a park added on a large building in the back of the park. There was a football field sized area of debris that was about 15 feet deep. I guess they ground it all up eventually.

[+fly46]

I had two go missing because the tree/shrub they were in was removed.

[+AtoZ]

I had the first stage of one of my cache, a film cannister burried under 10 feet of dirt by a road crew. I guess it just upped the difficulity factor, LOL.

 

cheers

[+Isonzo Karst]

I had one bulldozed by the Forest Service. I had one bulldozed by S.W. Fl Water Management when they put a test well into my pretty "secret" spring in the woods. I lost a couple to last summer's flooding (the Hurricane parade). I lost one when the host tree came down, also during one of the 4 hurricanes we had last summer. Oddly, I haven't lost any to controlled burns, even though there have been burns of the areas where some are - just lucked into having the fire skip them. (I"m going to be sorry I mentioned that, aren't I?) Only one lost to muggles.

[OuttaHand]

It wasn't MY cache, but I know of a virtual that disappeared.

The cache was a virtual of an old blacksmith's shop. When we got to the location, there were a couple of old barns, but nothing that looked like a blacksmith shop.

The people who owned the farm happened to be out in the yard so we asked them if they knew of an old blacksmith's shop that might be nearby. They chuckled.

"Yup -- there was an old blacksmith's shop right there (pointing) up til last weekend. We donated it to the local historical society. They loaded it onto a flatbed truck and hauled it away, contents and all, last weekend."

 

So in this case the cache, an entire building, was hauled away and moved to a park.

[+wandererrob]

I went to one this spring. The cache was right where it should've been, however its hiding spot has vanished courtesy of a prescribed burn in the area. So there we are approaching the coords and spotted it from 100 feet away, a feebly hidden ammo can. Some of the contents were singed and/or melted, but the can was intact.

 

We did our best to disguise it with what little brush and such we could find. But the poor thing still stuck out like a sore thumb. Unfortunately the cache owner is currently in South America until this fall.

[+Glenn]

The geopolice took mine. They said my ammo can looked to much like a bomb.

[+sTeamTraen]

The geopolice took mine. They said my ammo can looked to much like a bomb.

To get around the bomb squad problem, I made this cache on a bridge a micro.

 

However, I expect that at some future point (read the listing), the entire bridge will be destroyed. That will be very cool. And since it will let us finally get on with running those fibre-optic cables that are waiting for the tramway work to restart, I shan't miss my cache either.

[+GatoRx]

I had a micro in a stump in a small park. About a month after it was hidden, the stump was turned into mulch, courtesy of a stump grinder. The last people hunting the cache found chunks of plastic amid the wood...

[+Joypa]

How the heck do I know? I do not monitor it 24/7. For all I know it was taken by aliens as evidence of intelligent life on this planet.

[+Douglas_Clan]

Art Bell is a cacher ?

[+Hoppingcrow]

I put up a puzzle cache, but shortly after the first find, the Boy Scouts came along and made some improvements to the first waypoint (a monument). You see, to get to the second waypoint, you needed to count the pickets in each of four fence panels left of the gate, and no two panels had the same number of pickets.. Well, they moved the gate over about five feet, unbeknownst to me, and people started counting themselves into the middle of nowhere.

 

I started receiving DNF reports, so I went out and took pictures of the *real* second waypoint, posted them to the cache page: If you aren't here, you've worked the puzzle incorrectly. I still got DNF's. Finally, it dawned on me that the problem must have been at the starting point. I revisited the monument and discovered what had happened. After making adjustments to the puzzle, I started receiving "found it!" logs again.

 

Moral: never assume anything is permanent.

[+Fergus]

I have one cache that has been lost three times by floods. I have another cache that the foot bridge that it was attached to was removed to build a more permanent structure. The new bridge should be ready in about a year.

[koz]

I have one cache that has been lost three times by floods. I have another cache that the foot bridge that it was attached to was removed to build a more permanent structure. The new bridge should be ready in about a year.

moi aussi...had one too close to a creek and spring flood waters took it awat

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

I have one cache, Irondale Park, that has wonderous magical dissappearing qualities!.

 

It has twice dissppeared and then reappeared - once it was gone for one week - I took a news crew with me, doing a story on geocaching, and couldn't find my own cache! That was fun. No, not embarrassing in the least! I went there a week later to replace it - and the cache is right where I left it!

 

Okay, I figure some kid found it, took it home, Mom saw what it was and had him put it back. No problem.

 

Couple of weeks later comes a DNF note - I go check the cache, gone again!

 

I got busy (lazy) and just temporarily disabled it; a friend calls me a month later, he'd

stopped by to drop in a bug, found it without trouble and wondered why it was disabled!

 

I went by yesterday to restock it and it's still full of goodies! Go figure!

[+Team Cotati]

Some slimebag muggle ripped it off.