A lot of caches in urban settings (and rural, wilderness settings as well) are meant to camouflage well. So well, that they can be in plain sight but you would not suspect them to be a geocache container. From mushrooms, to fake dog-pooh and rocks, or water spigots and coax cable junctions, there are a lot of ways that geocachers get creative in hiding caches out in the open. This is all well and good for people playing this game, but I am not usually a fan of these caches because they end up encouraging some odd behaviors that are at best just suspicious, and at worst kind of dangerous or damaging. I recently found one that was very well done, but left me feeling a bit unnerved. I won't post the GC code so as not to spoil it too much, but of course just posting these pictures is a kind of spoiler... you've been warned.
There are a few subtle hints that alert you to the fact that you are looking at a geocache here.
There are other electrical sockets on this building, but none of them are mounted in this way, with an extra piece of wood between the cover and the wall. That alone makes this socket seem suspicious. The presence of a useful prying tool is another hint, although I suspect that it is not always there. Opening up the outlet cover reveals a very normal looking electric socket. The GFCI buttons can be depressed, but it doesn't have any obvious means of a cache, or place where it can be removed. It does jiggle slightly though, suggesting that you have to pry out the socket.
This is what makes me very nervous. Aside from the subtle clues mentioned above, there isn't a good way to see that this is a geocache and not an actual circuit. I suppose one could plug in some kind of tester plug, but I doubt that most geocachers will have one handy. Instead you are left to start tampering with the socket in order to see if it is a geocache. I very cautiously did so and the whole socket started to come out. That is when I got really nervous. AS the socket began to pull out, not very easily I might add, I could see what appeared to be copper conductors attached to either side. A big red flag went up in my head then, since that could mean that this is actually hooked up to a circuit. IN the end though, I kept working at it since I was getting a "geocache vibe" fromt he outlet, and indeed with a little more prying the whole outlet popped out, revealing a cavity behind which contained the cache log.
It is apparent that the creators of this geocache went to great lengths to make it look very real, which is what good camouflage should do, but this authenticity also led me into some pretty risky behavior, prying at an electric outlet without really knowing if it was live or not. I really ought to be more careful. On this day, my
hunch was correct and the outlet was indeed a geocache, but in other locations I might not have been correct. There are a lot of other geocache locations where there is electrical equipment, or plumbing of various sorts (high pressure gas, water etc...) and if you go into those situations with a mentality that you may need to tinker with components in order to locate the geocache, you could find yourself in serious trouble. I have seen several instances where irrigation sprinklers near geocaches were destroyed, and suspect that it is because cachers tinker with these in their search. I'm guilty of this myself. On these high difficulty, well hidden caches, you begin to get a mentality that it could be anything, and start to tinker with everything in sight, even to the detriment of the equipment. I feel terrible about this kind of thing, and really ought to curb this behavior in myself. I suppose I have partially, since I do not go after high difficulty urban caches as much anymore.
My final thoughts on these caches is that they can be done very well if they have some kind of geocache identifier placed on the cache, something like a small geocaching log sticker on the inside of the cover, or the GC-code written on it somewhere. Having an identifier like this would let geocachers know that what they have found is indeed the cache, and they needn't worry about destroying public property. It does defeat the purpose of making it difficult to find, although it keeps the cache well hidden from non geocachers still. I think that the cache shown above could have a GC-code written, or labeled somewhere inside the cover and it would still be fun to find. Cachers would then know that they needn't worry about those exposed electrical conductors, that it is just part of the disguise.
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