Mission 8: Wattle’s Edge

The Mission 8: Wattle’s Edge geocache (GC1058) was placed in July 2001 in Wattle Park, some fifteen kilometres from Melbourne in Australia. It was the eighth leg of Project A.P.E., the operation set up by Groundspeak and Twentieth Century Fox for the release of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: fourteen army-green ammo cans scattered across the world in the course of the summer of 2001, each one furnished with a genuine prop from the shoot.

The name came from the place: Wattle Park. The container was waiting at the northern edge of the park, along the Wattle Park Walk trail, slightly off to one side: you had to "look beyond the path".

It did not last three months. The last visit dates from 3 October 2001; the can disappeared soon afterwards and the cache was archived on 25 November. The other Australian mission, Mission 11: Tallow's Sand, near Byron Bay in New South Wales, evaporated in the same way a few months later. Neither of them has ever resurfaced, and an Australian retailer is offering a thousand Australian dollars for each one, no questions asked, betting that they are asleep at the back of a suburban garage.