Mission 10a: River Bearer

The Mission 10a: River Bearer geocache (GC12AC) was placed on 27 July 2001 north of Atlanta in the United States, on the very day Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes was released in American cinemas. It is one of the fourteen caches spread around the world that summer by Fox to promote the film, each containing a genuine prop from the shoot.

That Friday, two missions were published at once, on either side of the Atlantic. The British side, Mission 10b: Meridian Snake, placed on the Greenwich meridian, contained on top of its prop some tickets to the British premiere; the American side, for its part, fell on release day in the United States.

The first to arrive, bent_twigs, had spent the night reloading the Project A.P.E. site while waiting for the coordinates to be published. They came shortly after midday: he covered some thirty kilometres, forced his way through a wall of brambles and opened an outsized ammo can that every later visitor would talk about. The film prop was at the bottom: two little clay pots mounted in a wooden frame with a handle, just the thing for carrying water. He then went off to see the film. The rival who arrived a few minutes later stopped to chat with him, missing the FTF by a whisker.

The logs of that summer of 2001 play along with the fiction: the rowers of the neighbouring rowing club are taken for enemy agents patrolling the river, and people congratulate themselves on having escaped the helicopters - in reality, mosquitoes. The cache has since been archived, like most of the A.P.E. ones; only Mission 4, in Brazil, and Mission 9, in Washington State, are still in play. An inventory kept by Team Markwell keeps track of them all.