They Would Have Loved It

The They Would Have Loved It geocache (GCGGGV) rests on the shore of Monroe Lake, in north-western Ontario. Two brothers placed it there on 11 July 2003, at the very spot where they liked to stop for lunch between two fishing trips. The title says who they had in mind: their father and their grandfather, keen fishermen now gone, who would have loved that stretch of shore.

Then nothing. For twenty years nobody came to sign the logbook, and it became the oldest geocache in the world never yet found. Its owner did come back from time to time by floatplane: after a forest fire had damaged the container, he replaced it in 2021 with an orange box, leaving the original, blackened notebook inside.

In September 2023, three geocachers - Langlie, HeineHunter and essap2 - decided to go there with their boots and their canoe. Two days and nearly eighteen kilometres later, they had made it: an old logging road given back to the firs, a peat bog, five lakes and a canoe dragged through woods and burnt forest. "We were ready to paddle, but nothing prepared us for hauling a canoe through the forest", Langlie summed up. Once at ground zero, the big rock announced by the hint on the cache page was indeed there, with its old beer can sitting on top.
The adventurers tell of the night spent under a sky of absolute purity, without any light pollution, and of the return in total darkness where, canoe on their shoulders, they had to "channel their inner drive" to push forward by force and flatten the undergrowth.
The logbook was signed at last, twenty years on. The cache is still active, and its story - whose "found it" log is worth a look - earned it geocache of the week in November 2023, then a place in the selection of the year.