Like all hobbies, geocaching has its own unique goals (see Challenges), perhaps more so than others due to its numbers-driven quality. And Seattle probably has more unique goals than other places, just because there are so many geocaches here. Seattle's most prized goal is to find the Seattle FTF Bell, which I managed to do last week along with a couple of other people.
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| Fast like a turtle |
First-to-Find
The concept of being first to find is fairly self-explanatory: someone hides a cache, and you are the first person to find it (or one of the people in a group that finds it first). For my first few months of caching, I wasn't particularly interested in this pursuit, but I got my first chance in late August when we were vacationing in the Methow Valley (where of course, the competition is much less than in Seattle, if only because there are fewer people around). Someone hid a cache a few miles from where we were staying on the day we arrived, and I just happened to notice it in the afternoon. I piled the kids in the car to go look, confident I'd find it, but other than an amusing incident with a pig that followed our car down the road, there was no joy on that hunt. The next morning, the cache was still unfound, and the hiding spot was next to a parking lot where my wife had to be dropped off for a trail run (The Cutthroat Classic, run on one of the most scenic stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail, by the way. We're both doing it next year), so I looked some more. And failed again. Later in the day I took the kids to the same spot (where we had to meet my wife after the run), and failed a 3rd time. I still haven't found that cache, but a number of other people have.
Ironically, the next day I could have easily gotten a FTF in the even more sparsely populated town of Conconully, Washington, when I bicycled into town to stay a few days. But I didn't check the website for new caches in Conconully, and I had no internet access there, so someone from Leavenworth drove all the way there and found the cache first.
To really play the FTF game, though, you don't want to count on hitting the website at just the right time: you want automatic notifications when the caches are published. This is a premium feature on geocaching.com, so you have to pay them money. But if you have, the link to Set Up Notifications is on the right column of your Quick View page. Conveniently, the default is to notify you of anything published within 10 miles of your home location (you did set up your home location, didn't you?). Inconveniently, you have to set up a different notification for each type of cache. Luckily, there are only about half a dozen of them that are at all common (Multicache: okay. GPS Adventures Exhibit: uh, what?).
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| It started out as just a bell... |
The Seattle FTF Bell
Now-retired cacher fishiam gives a good summary of the Bell's history:
...it was not initially called the Seattle FTF bell, but rather the TUS FTF bell. What does TUS stand for you might ask? Tiresome Usual Suspects, a moniker (derisively) hung on a group of us back in 2005/2006 that were a largish (8-10) group of avid FTF'ers. We were fiercely competitive, going after all forms of new postings - from 1/1 traditionals to the toughest puzzles. Team Maccabee rather brilliantly created the bell as a way of both defusing and illuminating the competitive FTF scene in Seattle at the time.[Note: a '1/1 traditional' is a cache with the easiest possible difficulty rating and no puzzle required to solve it whatsoever.]
Team Maccabee (the original and still-active owner of the Bell) just found an old bell, added a special tag to it so that it was a trackable item, and hid it in a not very difficult cache. As the years went by, the Bell was found and hidden by others, sometimes in fairly standard caches, but often in ridiculous locations (Kellogg Island) or with ridiculously difficult puzzles to solve (or multiple puzzles. Note that the FTF for this cache drove from Mt. Vernon to Seattle to claim the prize).
As the years went by, the Bell was also renamed to the Seattle FTF Bell, and acquired an increasingly large collection of other objects attached to it (see the picture below) so that it is now too large and too valuable to actually leave in a cache. If you are the FTF of a Bell cache, you have to contact the cache owner to acquire your prize.
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| ...and now it's come to this. |
Arcade
The first time I heard about the Bell was in 2011 when a friend tried to enlist me to help find a cache in Discovery Park. I wasn't much help, and I still haven't figured that puzzle out, even with the hints that were added later. But when a new cache called Arcade was published on Thursday around lunchtime, I thought I'd give it a chance. After all, it was apparently near Lake Union, so it was fairly close by if I managed to solve the puzzles.
The puzzle in Arcade was to win 3 video games online, Pac-man, Solitaire, and Minesweeper. Each one gave you a cache clue after you beat it. I started with Minesweeper, since I figured that would be a good gauge of how hard the games would be -- you can program the game to be just about as hard as you want by increasing the number of mines to find. As you know if you've played Minesweeper, the game involves a lot of logic and, assuming more than a few mines, a bit of luck. By using a few basic strategies (basically, make your 50-50 guesses at the beginning of the game) I was able to clear this one after about a dozen tries and about 5 minutes of work. It yielded a combination.
Next I tried Solitaire, which was just the standard game of Klondike. Like Minesweeper, there are a few strategies you can use to increase your odds of winning, but since this was just a speed game, I abandoned games early unless they appeared promising and again beat the game in about 5 minutes, which yielded the longitude coordinates.
Finally I turned to Pac-Man, a game I'm not very good at. Fortunately for me, this was a strange version that (at least on my browser) featured no maze, just an array of dots, and only one ghost. To make things easier, all it took was one deke and the ghost wandered off the edge of my window and never returned. Trying the game later on other browsers, it appears no one ever gets a maze or more than one ghost, but the ghost does sometimes play a little smarter. Still, it's easy to fool if you just draw it off-screen. It seems that you can return from off-screen, but the ghost never does. In any event, with no ghost, it was just a matter of gobbling up the dots to get the latitude coordinates. Together the coordinates yielded a street corner just a couple of miles away, so I set out to see what I could find.
At Ground Zero I saw two women (the bad news). But they were clearly still searching (the good news). They told me they had been looking for 20 minutes without any luck. I joined them in not finding the cache. A few minutes later, another gentleman, markta showed up, and together we all 4 failed to find anything except one suggestive piece of wood. I stripped the bark off the wood looking for a special way to open it, but could not. After about 10 minutes, the women gave up and left. A few minutes later, markta, after learning I had never had a FTF, yielded the search to me, as he had already had many of his own, including finding the Bell about 5 years ago when it was still young.
A few minutes after he left, I was getting increasingly discouraged, when who should show up but methylgrace, a cacher I'd met virtually but not in person. She hadn't beat the games either, but was instead directed here by Atomhugger, who had, but was too busy to find it himself. After showing her where I thought the coordinates pointed, she just reached out and grabbed it from its hiding place. D'oh! I could have sworn I just searched there.
Luckily, she was gracious enough to credit all of us with a 3-way FTF. The cache was contained in a lockbox like real estate agents use (hence the combination), which was, of course, not large enough for the Bell. We picked it up from the cache owner about 15 minutes later.
Our job now is to concoct a devilish enough puzzle and/or hide for the next cache. Also to add something to the Bell to make it even more unwieldy. The picture above was taken in our secret underground cache construction lair. Okay, it was at a local coffee shop.
P.S. I've gotten 2 more FTFs since finding the Bell.
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| Ride bikes! Donate food! Dress up like Miles Standish! |
Upcoming and ongoing
- WIOL/Winter O #2 - November 17, Magnuson Park. Remember if it rains that Magnuson used to be a swamp. You've been warned.
- Southcenter Mall Scavenger Hunt - November 17. You could win an ornament! Should I mention that the only time I went to this mall, I escaped being caught in a lockdown by about 90 minutes? Yeah, I think I should.
- Cranksgiving 2012 - November 17, Gas Works Park. Ride down to Columbia City, collecting food for charity along the way. It's like your own personal food drive on wheels. I'd do it were it not for prior commitments. See above. No, above the mall scavenger hunt.
- Fall BEAST Race - November 18, Maple Valley. The 'E' in BEAST stands for Evening, but thankfully, this race is during the day. Some running, some biking, some orienteering, a surprise challenge. And if it's on the Eastside, there's usually snow involved, somehow. Not on purpose, but it just seems to happen. Seems unlikely given the weather forecast, but still...
- Puzzlewright Puzzle Games - November 18, 2pm, Northgate Barnes and Noble. 'Tis the season...for contests in malls, I guess. This one seems a little more palatable, though: a puzzle contest put on by a puzzle book press. Your prize if you win: a book of puzzles. Go if you like puzzles.
- Holiday Goose Chase - starts around Thanksgiving, I presume. A scavenger hunt of sorts in downtown Seattle. Requires downloading a mobile app. Put on by geoteaming, a local company that puts on geocaching-themed events.
- WIOL/Winter O #3 - December 1, Bridle Trails State Park. It's in a state park, so it's a little more rustic. Oh, wait, it's in Kirkland.
- Puzzled Pint - December 11, ???. Meet at a local pub to do puzzles on teams. Which pub? Well, there's a puzzle you have to solve to find out, released the previous day (if you can't figure out what day that is, you probably shouldn't come). Repeats every 2nd Tuesday of the months at different locations.
- WIOL/Winter O #4 - December 15, UW Campus. There is only one time you can hold a meet on the UW campus: between quarters. I like this venue if only because I can occasionally beat the top orienteers (on a single checkpoint only) because I know the place pretty well.
Photo Credits
Geocaching log: eszter via photopin cc
Gracie (the dog): schulesjoe
