Octopus' Garden

The Octopus' Garden geocache (GC70) is the first mystery in the history of geocaching. It was placed on 30 September 2000 in North Carolina, in the United States. It is the first geocache in the state, and it has never left the game: today it ranks among the forty oldest caches still active on the planet. Its name comes from Ringo Starr's song on Abbey Road, and the rest of the listing bathes in the same universe: Pepperland, the Blue Meanies, the yellow submarine.

It was first a moving cache, one of those you had to place somewhere else once you had found it. It took until 18 February 2001 for someone to lay hands on it. Passed from finder to finder, it travelled a great deal, and not always well: AdventureTom, who ended up adopting it, tells of finding it thrown by the roadside, sitting on private land, or in pieces. The day the game did away with the moving cache concept, it came to rest wherever it happened to be.

Its owner then rebuilt it as a puzzle, losing nothing of the Beatles décor, and dedicated it to his father, Top Cat, a geocacher too. You park at the Margaret Wallace Road trailhead, opposite the fire station, and walk along the Campbell Creek Greenway, a wooded corridor following a tributary of McAlpine Creek, with its beavers and its birds. The puzzle can be solved in your head or on the spot: the owner warns of one thing only, that you must neither cross the bridge nor wade the creek.