Mission 7: Crab Creek (Project APE)

The Mission 7: Crab Creek (Project APE) geocache (GCEF7) was placed on 5 July 2001 in the woods of Rock Creek Regional Park, in Maryland in the United States: a twenty-minute walk along a trail, some thirty kilometres from Washington, what the listing nicely called "the heart of the beast". It was one of the fourteen caches spread around the world that summer by Groundspeak and Twentieth Century Fox to accompany the release of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, each of them a big stamped ammo can holding a genuine prop from the film.

Its owners, Dep&Uno&Co, left the area and looked for someone to keep an eye on it: a local geocacher, 2Wheel'in, agreed and became co-owner of the cache. At the end of June 2006, the Lake Needwood dam, just upstream, started leaking after torrential rain: the lake rose by several metres and 2,400 inhabitants of the valley were evacuated in the middle of the night. Drowned, the cache was moved to temporary coordinates, then put back in its original spot on 4 July, the eve of its fifth birthday, by 2Wheel'in. In their logs, the visitors who came from far away that week tell of thunderstorms, closed paths and journeys back and forth around the lake to reach it.

The respite was short-lived. In the autumn of 2006, a few weeks after Mission 12 disappeared in Illinois, the Crab Creek can vanished in its turn. The geocachers of Maryland concluded it had been stolen and the listing was archived. Of the fourteen missions of 2001, only two are still in play today.