The Washington State A.P.E. Cache just turned 20, so it seems like a good time to look back on some A.P.E. Cache History. Mission 9: Tunnel of Light was hidden on July 18, 2001 and is located in the Cascade Mountains, just outside of Seattle. Many geocachers choose to walk through the 2-mile-long Tunnel of Light to visit this last remaining A.P.E. cache in North America. When we visited for the first time back in July 2010, the tunnel was closed so we had to hike in a different way.
This historic geocache went missing and was then archived in June 2011. A tribute cache was placed at the site and geocachers continued to visit, but they weren't able to get the special and highly coveted A.P.E. cache icon.
Then, in April 2016, a group of determined geocachers went out hunting and managed to find the original A.P.E. cache container. After much discussion and a geocacher survey, the original A.P.E. cache was reinstated. We interviewed some of the team that recovered the remains of the Seattle A.P.E. Cache on Show 574.
Shortly after that, we heard from Nancy of The Deadliest Cachers with this question. "I would like to know what happened to all the other caches from this Project A.P.E. series."
We did some research and uncovered a few resources. One of the most informative sites was created by geocacher Markwell who placed and later adopted A.P.E. cache #12 in Illinois. It details some of the history and also links to all of the original A.P.E. cache listings. Some of the links no longer work, but it has a lot of information.
Many of the A.P.E. caches were archived in 2001, the same year they were placed, by the ProjectAPE CO account. It seems that 20th Century Fox had no more interest in the geocaches once the publicity stunt was completed. Here’s a quick run down from what we were able to glean from the cache pages:
A.P.E. caches #1 (California), #2 (Oregon), #5 (California), #6 (Japan), #8 (Australia), and the special premiere cache in NY were all archived in 2001, each with less than 14 finds, some as few as 2 or 4 finds.
A.P.E. cache #10b (UK) was archived in 2002 with 15 finds.
A.P.E. cache #11 (Australia) wasn’t archived until 2003 but only had 2 finds.
A.P.E. cache #10a (Georgia) lasted until 2003 with 63 finds.
A.P.E. cache #3 (New York) was changed to a traditional cache after the container went missing in 2003 and is still active. It had about 29 finds while it was still an A.P.E. cache.
Here are the ones that lasted the longest: A.P.E. cache #7 (Maryland) was archived in 2006 with 736 finds. A.P.E. cache #12 (Illinois) also made it to 2006 with 517 finds.
There are only two remaining A.P.E. caches now.
A.P.E. cache #9 (Washington) was archived in 2011 with 3080 finds but now since being re-instated, it stands at almost 5800 finds.
A.P.E. cache #4 (Brazil) currently has 774 finds.
Here are some other resources:
Project A.P.E. Wiki page
Project A.P.E. bookmark list
Have you found any of the Project A.P.E. Geocaches? We'd love to hear about it!
Do you have a geocaching related question we can answer for you? Write and tell us about it!
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