In Search of Great Geocaches

The weather is warming up and our feet are growing itchy! Over the cold winter when we could get out, we set our sights locally when it came to geocaching. When the threat of severe weather is real, the desire to travel hours to find great caches is limited. Furthermore, shorter days and colder temperatures tended to yield more modest goals. But those days are behind us for a few months!

Our strategy to find a place to go: look for the most cherished geocaches. Using the Pocket Query function (all premium members can use these) I created a query with a 200 mile radius from home, yielding a maximum of 50 caches, and sorted it by favorite points. I then added geocaches from two geocache “trails”: the WV Civil War Geotrail and the Gadgets of Berkeley County Trail. There were little clusters around Erie, Columbus, and Parkersburg but easily half of the caches were in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. Decision made!

We based ourselves out of a hotel in Reston, VA, which wasn’t super close to the Eastern Panhandle but supported some of our other goals (visiting friends in the DC area and visiting a Micro Center). It also enabled us to take in some stunning spring scenery.

On Saturday morning we set out early from the hotel to start from the furthest away cache of our goal area: Welcome to Maryland. This was the only cache that was not in West Virginia that we found and to access it, we had to drive into Pennsylvania. This means we hit four states on Saturday. I like little statistics like that. It also perfectly positioned us to find The Key is the Key, which is located at the I-81 southbound West Virginia Welcome Center. The Key is the Key may be my absolute favorite cache of the entire day. We may have had to cheat just a little to figure it out but when we did, it really appealed to the engineer in me. WVTim had posted a video on YouTube about the cache and that’s how we learned the correct approach. I strongly recommend checking out the video, especially if you think the WV Eastern Panhandle is a place you’ll never get to visit.

We found two of the Gadgets of Berkeley County caches and unfortunately did not find one of them, though the one we did not find was our favorite (and, in retrospect, another cacher may have been signing the log which is why we couldn’t find it). GBC 1 – Visitor’s Center, whose first stage is at the same place as WV Civil War Trail Zone 3 – The Round House, is the definition of a park and grab at both stages. But not only does the first stage offer amazing views of historical railroad infrastructure, a spin of the radio dial reveals so much more about the area and the geocache.

Though we had decided that our primary objective for the weekend would be to find enough of the geocaches in Zone 3 of the WV Civil War Trail to qualify for that zone’s geocoin. After receiving the coin for zones 4 and 5, we knew we had to get the other three. In order to qualify, we had to find eight of the fifteen caches in the zone. On Saturday we found:

So we found five of the caches and discovered five incredible Civil War sites. So often it feels as if WV didn’t see much action in the Civil War due to the inhospitable terrain but through this trail it’s easy to discover the key roles the state had in the war. This series is also great for newer cachers as the containers tend to be very similar in size and how they are hidden, the series also includes a few simple, but extremely well-executed, multi-stage caches. Given we only found five on Saturday, our trip home on Sunday was designed to ensure we picked up at least three more.

Overall, we picked up 12 geocaches on Saturday and every single one was outstanding. Despite picking up those 12, there are at least as many that are on our “most wanted” list remaining in the area for us to return for (maybe in 2 weeks when I get my next whole weekend off?).