My Quality Day: My First GeoArt

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

My First GeoArt

This is going to be the topic of one of my columns this month- not sure which paper yet, but I'll give you a sneak peek.

Did you know there are some geocaches that are "multi-caches." They can be arranged to draw out a picture. Maybe. More on that in a minute.

So, who do I know that knows how to geocache, and is willing to drive terrible back roads, and would think it's all great fun? Sue! That's who!

Notice that she is holding a little tube that was hung in a tree. A geocache container can be pretty much anything that is waterproof. Quite a few of these were this size, but a few were bigger. There is a little log paper inside where you sign your Geochache Name and the date.

You also record on the official Geocache app map if you found it or not. We eventually did find all of the sites, although we had to go back to 4 of them a second time. I'll talk more about this in the article, but what I didn't know is that the actual locations of the geocaches do not make a picture. It's just that there is a cache associated with each dot. Yellow means we found it, and you can see they are all yellow.

The ones we could not find had the hint "PMD." Even though Sue is experienced with over 4000 cache finds, she did not know until we were able to look it up that meant "Pull Me Down." The cache is high in a young tree that had to be pulled over. See the painted bottle up there?

The last one of the day was way up high. I'm holding the tree down. Sue signed the log and we let it snap back up.

The name of this GeoArt is "Cider Apples" and it's in northeast Mason County. Each of the 33 locations is named for a different kind of apple. We started at 8 am and finished around 3 pm. It was 92° when we got done, but we were determined to find the four that we missed the first time.

Most interesting coincidence? 15 years ago Ellen and I went exploring and found Black Lake, a tiny puddle. We ate a picnic lunch in the freezing cold. Today, Sue and I came in from the other side- I didn't realize it was Black Lake until we were almost there. Today was totally the opposite of freezing. (Link below)