Mission 5: Fork in the Canyon

The Mission 5: Fork in the Canyon geocache (GCD35) was placed on 21 June 2001 in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, in California. It was part of Project A.P.E., set up by Groundspeak and Twentieth Century Fox for the release of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: fourteen caches scattered around the world in the summer of 2001, each one holding a genuine prop from the film.

The owner's text reads like a spy dispatch: a black stealth helicopter is said to have tailed the team, forcing its four members to scatter by land, by sea and by air. Then come more practical instructions - a narrow path where one wrong step sends you tumbling down the slope, a "bear cave" to keep an eye on, rattlesnakes - and a walk of one to five kilometres depending on where you leave the car. The published coordinates point to the Falls Trail, the waterfall path.

The adventure was brief: only a handful of geocachers signed the logbook, most of them going home empty-handed, and the cache was archived at the end of July 2001, five weeks after being placed.