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By Root 870 0

’d get pulled back in. Her rival Lee van der Bokke had been about fourteen hundred caches behind Black from the time he started and couldn’t gain any ground on her no matter what he did. In 2005, he heard from a mutual friend that she’d quit caching once and for all, in order to see more of her family. “Two days later,” van der Bokke marvels, “she hops on a plane and heads to Germany without her family for six weeks’ caching! That got me so upset.” In late 2008, she finally called it quits after her 25,000th cache and retired her CCCooper-Agency account for good. But within a week, she was caching again—though not as avidly—under a different handle. Finally, on the last day of 2009, at a cache near a Lancaster County lake just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she left the following log:

Was out enjoying a nice walk with my husband and he was the one to find it. Very nicely done. Last cache.

And with those two words, “Last cache,” she was finally done.

The saga of CCCooperAgency, as I come to understand it in fragments, from interviews and message board postings and geocache logs, is a cautionary tale for me. Some people are born with a genetic predisposition to addictions like alcoholism, but, like Lynn Black, I seem to have been born to geocache, and to geocache obsessively. My deepest loves—maps, exploring places, solving puzzles, space-age gadgetry—make me a perfect-storm candidate for GPS rehab.

After-school specials have led me to believe that “bottoming out” stories from real addictions often involve back alleys and Dumpsters, and in the end, mine does too. I’m nosing around the Dumpster behind a Discount Tire one afternoon because my GPS receiver seems convinced that there’s a geocache hidden somewhere in the rockery there. I’ve been searching for less than a minute when I realize that a jump-suited “tire specialist” is watching me with the kind of sour, victorious expression you’d expect from someone who just caught a strange man examining his garbage.

“Uh, what are you doing back there?” he wants to know, and I have to admit I can see his point.

I clamp my GPS to my ear. “Oh, sorry, I had to pull over and take this call. I sort of wander around when I’m on the phone.”

He stands watching me with arms folded until I’m back in my car and out of his parking lot.

What was I doing back there? Geocaching is supposed to be an excuse to explore the world’s hidden beauty spots, but I’ve made it from a means into an end. And because I’m a city dweller, most of my caching has been of the decidedly unscenic urban variety: “microcaches” dangling down manholes, magnetic “nanocaches” no bigger than Tylenol pills stuck to bike racks and garbage cans and ballfield bleachers, even one disguised as a wad of chewing gum and stuck under a table on a sub shop’s patio. I decide to broaden my horizons: I need to get out of the city.

Browsing the Groundspeak website, I discover a cache just two hours north of me that comes highly recommended. It sits above a little-known waterfall on the Nooksack River not far from the Canadian border. Only a handful of brave souls have found the cache: its Geocaching.com terrain rating is the maximum five stars, which would be a first for me. “THIS IS A VERY DIFFICULT SLOPE,” warns the hider’s description in stern capital letters. “DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS CACHE ALONE.” He also reminds me that I’m under no obligation to seek his cache, that he assumes no liability in the event of my untimely death or mangling disfigurement, etc. No more Dumpster diving—this is the cache for me!

That weekend, I dig out my hiking boots and some old work gloves and drive up to Hard Scrabble Falls. I’ve never been on this highway before, so I’ve brought some printouts of other nearby geocaches I might pass along the way. But the five-star cache is the first order of business. The bottom of the falls is a short, easy hike up a dry creek bed from the trailhead, and the morning is soul-scrubbingly beautiful. It’s early spring in the Northwest, the kind of day that seems gray and wintry until the sun breaks through the clouds