Bennies Blowout Battle

The Bennies Blowout Battle geocache (GC2V455) was placed on 27 April 2011 by The Bennies, at the foot of the Pripyat Ferris wheel, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The team had come to photograph the town twenty-five years to the day after the explosion of reactor no. 4; Geocaching HQ made it its geocache of the week in February 2016.

The Pripyat amusement park was due to open on 1 May 1986 for Labour Day: a yellow twenty-six-metre wheel and four other rides, bumper cars included. The accident happened five days earlier, and the town was evacuated on 27 April. The park's motionless wheel became the very image of Chernobyl, until Polish visitors turned it by hand in 2017, for the first time since 1986.

The earthcache asks you to measure the level of radioactivity with a Geiger counter. You can only come on an organised tour from Kyiv, and touch nothing, least of all the moss. A twin traditional cache, placed ten days earlier at the same spot, was archived by its owners after geocachers objected that it encouraged bad practice. Occupied by the Russian army from 24 February to 1 April 2022, the zone has been closed to visitors ever since, pending demining.