By: Louise Kempker (freeweez)
This story began in August of 2023, when a group of geocachers from Germany descended on Alaska. Through a comedy of errors (it’s a long story!), Dogliest and I ended up driving 6 of them: Ralf, Uve, George, Volker, Chris, and Volkmar –to various caches in Anchorage after their event in the evening. It seems that when German cachers come to visit our city, they take public transportation instead of renting a vehicle. They politely asked if we could take all of them to the oldest cache in Anchorage 2 days later. Dogliest and I cleared our calendar and picked them up on a Friday morning.
We headed to Kincaid Park aiming for GCA4D – Cooks Nook, placed in 2001. (Please read their logs on this cache dated 8-18-2023)! The trek was definitely a long hike, and a couple in our group of 8 headed a different direction, thinking the route to GZ would be shorter. After they all excitedly signed the log and took photos, we headed to a local place for dinner. It was during dinner that Ralf suggested that he and I partner and create an ‘Exchange Cache’.
Well folks—that has been almost 2 years in the making—but it has finally happened! There are 2 Exchange Caches—one from Anchorage – Cologne – Anchorage……and another from Cologne- Anchorage – Cologne. Here are the GC codes for each: GCAGN3J…..and GCA5XZA. There is a bit of adding and subtracting involved…but you can do it! The stages here in Anchorage are easily approachable. Please check them out—there are quite a few German cachers who are anxious and eager to partner with a ‘local’ to complete the Exchange Caches. This only one of the German logs from Cooks Nook:
“We are a group of 12 German Geocachers on our Tour “Wild West and Alaska” and log as WW2023. After our tour to Ukpiaġvik/Barrow we returned back to Anchorage and today once again our new friends freeweez and Dogliest took us on a fantastic tour through the western part of Anchorage. We enjoyed it so much and we had the best possible caching experience at this last day of our 2 weeks travel in the United States! Definitely this oldie was the highlight of the day! Not an easy one – I would say D 2.5 or higher, depending on the condions of moisture and the season – please be careful if you are not prepared! The path was quite steep and the vegetation made it difficult to walk. Ater more than 30 minutes of hiking we were very happy to find this oldest cache of Alaska in good condition – Geoklatti could find the box and log for our entire group., Thank you very much for the fun with this great cache, Captain Cook, says Seidenflamingo from Potsdam, Germany.”
