Official Geocache – Please Do Not Disturb

Our missing lock-n-lock with the Official Geocache Tag prominently displayed.

It Came as a Surprise

How disappointing is was to discover that our geocache was missing.  We had gone to check it at its secret location in Lawrence Park only to find that it wasn’t there.  It came as a surprise simply because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would steal it.  There were not any remains of the lock-n-lock, so I don’t believe it was disturbed by an animal. Although the cache itself was an easy find for geocachers, it was located in the woods up a fairly steep hill.  In the post Geocacher or Muggle ~ Which Are You?,  I told of how my daughter had been wanting to hide a cache.  She then described about hiding it, naming it, and so on.  After hiding the cache, we immediately started getting logs and sharing in the fun.

A Lengthy Rainy Spell

Shortly thereafter, Kalispell had a lengthy rainy spell  and the emailed logs stopped.  We thought it was the weather.  When the sunshine returned, we thought it a little odd that we weren’t getting any feed back about our cache called Magic Treehouse.   Summer had begun, tourists were arriving, and we figured the cache should be receiving lots of traffic. We thought the finders just hadn’t logged it in on geocaching. com  Finally, E urged us to check it as we were supposed to be good stewards of the cache and do regular maintenance anyway.

Suspects

After climbing the hill with my daughters and rooting around in the tree for the cache, I felt really bummed to discover it was gone.  Somehow I don’t think it was transients, but suspect that kids found it and thought in terms of finders keepers, losers weepers.  On the way back to our van, we talked about our loss and of all the little treasures we had put inside; bubbles, fashion shoe laces, magic washcloth, tape measure, etc.  It made me sad.

Honesty as defined by Merriam-Webster means uprightness of character or action. Honesty implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way.