Building Smiles

Last spring, a couple fellow geocachers asked me about my background, wondering where I came up with ideas for my caches. It took months of thinking about it, but I recently created a series of 13 caches that I called my autobiographical series to try and answer their innocent question.

Each of them are puzzle caches - a least one, and in some cases, two puzzles must be solved to determine the final coordinates of the cache.

Each of the puzzles starts with an online jigsaw puzzle that was built from a collage of personal pictures. Each cache listing told a part of my story, and the online jigsaw puzzle (when solved) provided the final coordinates or pointed to the next puzzle to be solved.

I tried to make cache containers that were congruent with the jigsaw puzzle.

I especially liked this one since it took the most searching to come up with the old pitchfork. I could easily get a new pitchfork, but I wanted an old, gnarly one. I finally found this one in an antique shop in Payson and got a super good deal on it because it wasn't useful anymore. Little did he know...

I did one about trucking, since working with Dad was where I first was introduced to planning and was the biggest influence on my leadership style.

Amazingly, this simple cache is the one that people seem to like the most.

I did one that was intended to recognize the influence of teachers in my life. I think of my high school wood shop teacher nearly every time I go out to play in the shop.

I thought this one would be the most popular cache of the series, but that's not how it turned out. Sometimes I come up with something simple that turns out to be very popular, other times, not so much.

I thought I was out of ideas with this series, and then a friend made a passing comment about a picture I posted to Facebook that has my mind buzzing with possibilities. One never knows where the next idea will come from.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying building smiles one cache at a time.