In November 2016, a team of dedicated geocachers went searching for one of the missing APE caches. The Mission 9: Tunnel of Light cache was muggled in 2011 and the original container was thought to have been stolen. However, the original box bearing the APE logo was recovered, and Groundspeak put out a call for the geocaching community to decide its fate. And, as the headline says, geocachers overwhelmingly voted to reactivate the cache.
More than 10,000 geocachers took part in the voting process, which was launched at the end of February. Voters were given four options: to activate it once a year, to display it at Geocaching HQ due to its historic nature, to make it a traveling artifact, or return and reactivate.
Here’s how the actual vote percentages broke down:
- 61% – Return and reactivate
- 17% – Activate once a year
- 13% – Display at Geocaching HQ
- 9% – Traveling artifact
According to Groundspeak, the cache will be returned to active status during this year’s annual Going APE Mega-Event, which is scheduled for August 19, 2017. In addition to celebrating the reactivation of the formerly-missing Mission 9: Tunnel of Light cache, the event will feature several other fun social activities including trackable trading and even the chance to snap a photo with Apezilla and sign his logbook.
Once this cache has been reactivated in August, it will be the second active APE cache. The other cache, Mission 4: Southern Bowl, is located in Brazil. For more information on the APE caches, check out this post.
