Geocaching Alaska

Back in April, I picked up a Travel Bug (TB) that wanted to travel to Alaska. We took it with us to a couple Arizona caches before we left on our trip, and then documented some of the places we visited with pictures added to the TB's gallery page.

Since the TB's owner wasn't specific as to where they wanted it to go in Alaska, we dropped it at a place with an appropriately Alaskan name. Mosquito Fork is host to the Chicken Scratch Cache (and a lot of mosquitos!) and is located just south of Chicken, Alaska.

In mid April, Geocaching Headquarters announced a promotion in partnership with the Forest Service and others to celebrate Smokey Bear's 75th Birthday. I was one of the 1,500 applicants that were drawn to receive a trackable which arrived in the mail just a couple days before we left home.

We brought our Smokey trackable with us on the drive north and then found an appropriate cache (Alaska the Beautiful) to drop it in north of the Wrangell - Saint Elias National Park. The cache certainly seemed appropriately named. This trackable was picked up a week later and has continued active traveling around Alaska.

Once we got settled with our moochdocking arrangement at Jeff & Carleta's neighbors, I got a chance to go out geocaching Alaska style for an afternoon. We'd hoped to go for a series of T5 caches, but the river was the highest they'd ever seen it - too high for the wheelers. Instead we did a nice short set of ammo can caches.

We haven't done a lot of geocaching since we arrived in Alaska, but I have been impressed with the quality of many of them. This one was located near a campground, and needed a magnet to open it.

Even once it was open, it took some inspection to locate the log container.

The state has an active geocaching organization. This is the first container with their logo that I've found this trip, but I found several of them when I was in Alaska in October.

We're having a great time with family who are enjoying the excellent Red (Sockeye) Salmon run. More on that later.