Geocaching December 2025

The month started off with simmsquestD/T Challenge, a challenge cache where I needed a whole bunch of 2.0 difficulty and 2.0 terrain caches. I finally got the last one in November so I was able to take credit for this one. The OMXC Workout Tour - #3 OM Hill filled a micro find for a calendar day. It's a small cache near a high school. The Oakland Mills (the "OM") cross country (the "XC") team used the hill for a little extra challenge. My main challenge was the cold temperatures! Next was CCT - 30 Day Streak - Challenge Cache Trail, another mystery/challenge day filled on the calendar. 

The second Monday morning coffee event was a fun get together, too bad I missed the first one! The next day I discovered Happy Trails! (a mystery that was relatively easy), with Surprise in the Rail and Amina Drive nearby easy traditional finds. 

A grail cache I've been trying to finish forever finally got done with help from a friend. Crossroads of Maryland is a multi-cache with some of the information missing but the friend filled me in. The cache owner died recently so people are trying to adopt it to keep it going--it's all about the history of the area and based around the Laurel train station.

On a library run I found the nearby The Legacy of a Simple Idea, a very easy mystery to solve and cache to find. More challenging was Haslup Family Cemetery, hidden away in an industrial park on top of a small hill covered in trees and thorns. 

The way a cemetery should look?

A helping hand

I found two more mysteries, Nap Time and R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. Challenge, to fill some calendar days. Then I started another week with a coffee event and ended the week with a Community Celebration Event that was supposed to be at an Ikea cafeteria but it didn't open early enough. The event switched to a nearby McDonalds that happened to have a cache, The Hippocamp, just out back. That same day I had to travel over to Virginia for some errands and found Burke Lake Park, the oldest active cache in Virginia!

Near GZ

The cache!

I finally qualified for Emilie's 3/4 Challenge, which I had signed months ago in Indianapolis. I needed a hundred caches with the numerals 3 or 4 in the title, which I had completed with the last coffee meetup. I hosted the next coffee meetup, so now I have 101!

I went to get another of the geo-tour caches I have been working on, 10 Monocacy Battlefield - HCWHA 250th GeoTour, . On the trip, I also found Silly Smiley Series - #16, Little Man, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Disguised, 75 Reviewers Challenge, and Beginning in 1886. I also found a couple of Adventure Labs but not enough for the final mystery cache. I was also working on a Wherigo at the battlefield but one of my kid's schools called and said she was feeling sick, so I had to return home. Maybe I will get back there again.

We flew to Arizona where I hosted by Community Celebration Event at a local brewery, the first time I put on an out-of-state event. The turnout was great--twenty to twenty-five people showed up. We heard lots of fun stories. Later, I found the multicache Beer Me - Never Tempt Fate Twice which was nearby. 

The group photo

Our rental was nearer Scottsdale, so I did a lot of geocaching there. At Papago Park, I found Rocket Man, Boot Hill, Holey Tafoni!, and 1434. Rocket Man was the coolest of the set even though Holey Tafoni! was amazing too.

Near Old Town Scottsdale, I found Scottsdale Points of Interest, Cachemas 2022 - Nine Metallic Inhabitants, and CADVCEVS, along with a lot of adventure labs in the area.  

The statue from CADVCEVS

The nine!

We also drove out to Goldfield, a tourist trap/recreation of a mining town, which had the amazing The O-Well 2112 TB & Coin Motel. I swapped some travel bugs and had to hide as the tourist train went by!

A cylindrical motel!

Log sheet

My geo-name on the sheet

In Phoenix proper, we visited Encanto Park for an Adventure Lab and its bonus cache. We drove over to the local library, another amazing location, for 910.285, a cache hidden inside the library.

The most beautiful part of the park

The geocache in the library

Inside the book

Informal Introductions was recommended at the meet-up, so I answered some trivia questions about a bunch of statues in a park by a building in downtown Phoenix. 

Not one of the statues, but the same park

I also found By Request, a Letterbox cache placed for a visiting Pennsylvanian who didn't have a car and needed one on a special day (such nice cachers in AZ!), along with Stars-Stars, a mystery cache that I DNFed and then the owner gave me a clue so I came back and made the find along with discovering the initials of a Monday Morning Coffee Club member! Aloha from Hawaii - Arizona was another gratitude cache.

CBSN was here!

Since it was the last day of the year, I finally did the locationless cache celebrating 25 years of geocaching.

A 25 at Desert Botanical Gardens

The month ended with 54 finds, a good chunk of them in Arizona. The year ended with a grand-total of 2266 caches since we started back in December 2003.