first to find hunt

In the world of geocaching, there are those who live by first to finds and those who don’t.

When I first started, I was totally into chasing them. It was a rush. But as I got going in the game, the novelty wore off. I didn’t enjoy chasing after them and the competition was getting a little tired. After all, I play sports where I am competitive, I didn’t need that to be in a casual game. (And yes, geocaching is a game… never understood when people call it a sport. It’s not.)

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still nice to grab a FTF sometimes. It’s nice to see a clean log book and it’s also nice to know how the owner originally intended on the cache being found.

But, it’s rare for me to run out for an FTF, especially at night. I don’t cache at night too often because I sometimes thinks it takes away from the game and maybe some great things to see. This changes, of course, if doing an actual night cache or simple park and grabs.

So this past Monday, it took me off guard when I got a phone call about new caches.

See, one of my friends has recently gotten into caching. And I remember those days. The excitement. The fun. He’s gotten the bug pretty badly.

With that in mind, it didn’t shock me when he called noting some new caches had published and he got the e-mails. Being these were in our area, he wanted to go chase them.

I checked them out and saw they were in a state forest area. And on some roads that weren’t so populated, so what the heck?

Shoes on, jacket on and some flashlights, off we went to score the FTFs.

Our area is interesting when it comes to FTFs. If they are in one part of it, it’s pretty tough to land a FTF. There are several who chase them and if you aren’t really quick, you won’t get them.

But over toward me, it’s a little more lax. Not that people won’t eventually do it, but there have been times when caches have gone three or more days without being found.

Needless to say, we snaked these without issue.

It was a decent night out with a pretty bright moon. Add to that being done before 11 and it worked out well. And, I won’t lie, it was quite fun. Geocaching at night has its own issues — you have to really look at things closer on tough hides. But that makes it fun, too.

I don’t indent on getting into night caching much again, but I did enjoy this night.

And there were some FTFs to book. Not to shabby.