BVGC's Festive Favorite: What Was Your Best Cache Find of 2025?

As the year wraps up and the holidays begin, it's the perfect time to slow down, grab a mug of hot cocoa, and reflect on the great geocaching adventures we shared.

The Brazos Valley saw incredible new hides, challenging trails, and unforgettable FTFs this year. Now we want to hear from you: What was the best, funniest, or most memorable cache you found in 2025?

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🎁 Join the BVGC End-of-Year Conversation!

We're asking everyone to jump into our Facebook group! and tell us about that one find that made your entire year. There's no right answer—it could be the oldest cache, the most challenging gadget, or just a simple container with a view!

Tell Us About Your Favorite Find!

• Which Cache Code (e.g., GC49C, GC8K800)
• Why was it great? (The hike, the container, the logbook entry, the view?)
• Who were you with? (Solo, family, fellow BVGC members?)

We'll highlight some of the best submissions next month as we kick off our 2026 caching year!

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🌲 Quick Holiday Caching Tips

If you decide to squeeze in some last-minute caching this week, keep these holiday tips in mind:

• Muggle Alert: Areas near shopping centers and parks will be very busy. Please be extra mindful of stealth!
• Family Fun: The holidays are a perfect time to introduce a visiting relative to the fun of geocaching. Look for caches with a Difficulty (D) rating of 1 or 1.5.
• Souvenir Window: Don't forget, the Closing 2025 Souvenir is active from December 24-31! Log a find to earn it!

From the BVGC Team, we wish you a wonderful Christmas and a safe New Year's!

🎁 🗺️ 🌲

🏆 Get Ready! Texas Challenge 2026 is Going Mega!

Taylor, TX • March 11–15, 2026 | GCB4F75

If you've been around Texas caching for more than five minutes, you already know: Texas Challenge is the geocaching event of the year. And 2026 is shaping up to be one of the biggest ones yet.

The Central Texas Region of the Texas Geocaching Association has officially announced the 24th Annual Texas Challenge & Geocaching Festival. The main event is March 14, 2026, with a full lineup spanning five days. As of today, there are already hundreds of "Will Attend" logs — and we're still months out!

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the "I'm coming!!" counters.

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🧭 What Makes Texas Challenge Special?

Texas has hosted Challenge twenty-three years in a row, and it remains one of the only megas in the world centered around competition and state pride. Expect a legendary event featuring:

• Team and Individual geocaching competition
• Region vs. Region bragging rights
• Huge GeoArts and challenging Gadget Caches
• Vendor villages for all your coin and trackable needs
• ...and the legendary trail stories that follow 👀

If you've never been before, think: Mega-event + state fair energy + Scout camp + a little organized chaos. In other words: perfection.

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📅 2026 Schedule (So Far)

Here's the official event list confirmed in the TXGA announcement. Log them all for a full week of fun!

Wednesday – March 11

📍 GCBAEAY — Welcome Wednesday (with Pie!)
Texas hospitality starts with baked goods. As it should.

Thursday – March 12

🛢️ GCBAEAZ — Not Your Usual Lamppost Cache (Event!)
Curiosity is already killing us.

🍻 GCBAEB0 — Here's To Dear Old Taylor…
Evening social event + early bragging rights trading.

Friday – March 13

🌅 Morning Event — **TBA**

🍖 GCBAEB2 — Friday Night at the Cathedral of Smoke
This is at Louie Mueller BBQ — one of Texas Monthly's top spots and a literal "Cathedral of Smoke." (Texas Challenge choosing BBQ? Absolutely on brand.)

Saturday – March 14 (The Main Event!)

🏆 **Texas Challenge & Geocaching Festival**
7:00 AM – 3:00 PM: Competition, festivities, vendors, chaos, adrenaline. The works.

🤠 GCBAEB3 — Texas County Challenge Finishers' Reunion
Saturday night at The Cotton Country Club in Granger — live country band and true Texas dance hall vibes.

Sunday – March 15

🌄 Morning Event — **TBA

🧹 Sunday CITO — **TBA
(You know it will be popular… because everyone wants that last smiley before heading home.)

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📍 Why BVGC Should Start Planning Now

Here in the Brazos Valley, we are going to show up strong—and Taylor is only about an hour and a half away!

This is perfect for:

• Day trips and quick weekend excursions
• Group caravans and road-tripping playlists
• Trying to guess which ridiculous team name will win this year
• Bragging about your finds for the next twelve months!

Crucial Reminder: The earlier you log "Will Attend," the better the hosts can plan for the huge crowd. Challenge 2026 is going to be BIG.

📣 Call to Action

If you're a BV cacher, start thinking about:

• Lodging and carpools
• Who you're competing with (or who you're avoiding competing against 👀)
• How much BBQ you can physically eat in one weekend

And don't forget: 👉 Log your Will Attend on the main event page (GCB4F75) right now!

It helps the hosts — and it definitely helps hype the event for the entire state. We hope to see a massive BVGC contingent in Taylor!

Posted by Brazos Valley Geocachers • Category: 🎪 Events

You Know You're a Brazos Valley Geocacher When…

If you've spent any time caching around Bryan-College Station and the surrounding counties, you already know:

The Brazos Valley has its own flavor of geocaching.

Here's a list of signs that you may officially be one of us…

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🅰️ 1. You've tried to grab a cache on campus… on game day… and instantly regretted it.

"Available parking" becomes a myth.
Your GPS says you're 400 feet from ground zero.
Your car says “Nope.”

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👀 2. You've been stared down by at least three Aggie Ring-Day families mid-search.

Stealth level: zero.
Confidence level: also zero.

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🚧 3. You've wondered whether a cache survived the latest round of  road construction.

Every hide is a race between you and the bulldozers.

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🌾 4. You’ve absolutely bushwhacked through thick brush and instantly remembered: “Oh yeah… this is Texas.”

Thorns. Briars. Fire ants. Regret.

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🪵 5. You've found a logbook in a container that somehow survived 120°F heat, Freezing temperatures AND a thunderstorm in the same week.

Texas weather builds stronger cachers.

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🐍 6. You've done a snake check before reaching into anything.

Mailbox hide? Snake check.
Cedar stump? Snake check.
Guardrail? Mega snake check.

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🧠 7. You’ve spent 20 minutes inspecting a metal pipe…

…only to learn later you weren't the only one...
Looking at you, Tanzanite fans.

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🏞️ 8. You have special feelings about parks like:

• Lick Creek Park
• Gabbard Park
• Wolf Pen
• Richard Carter Park

Each one has a very specific “caching memory” attached to it.

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🏛️ 9. You've hit a Courthouse Square cache in Madisonville “just because you were already driving by.”

And somehow it turned into a full day trip.

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🎒 10. You know who the local FTF hounds are… and you've been outrun by at least one.

Sometimes by three.

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📍 11. You proudly claim the Brazos Valley as your home turf.

Not just Bryan.
Not just College Station.
But the whole seven-county region that makes up our caching community.

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🐄 12. You've definitely found a cache hidden somewhere near livestock.

Cows staring at you while you sign the log? Completely normal around here.

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🎉 13. You’ve been to at least one BVGC event and walked away with:

• a sticker
• a new friend
• AND a story you didn’t expect

Bonus points if it involved a puzzle.

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🧭 14. You've solved a puzzle cache involving the Aggie War Hymn, a NASA photo, three random emojis, and a QR code.

And you were proud of it.

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🪪 15. You keep an extra pen in your car, your bag, and sometimes your shoe.

Because you've learned the hard way.

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🎉 If you relate to at least five of these… welcome to the club.

You're officially a Brazos Valley Geocacher, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Posted by Brazos Valley Geocachers • Category: 🗺️ Other

The Tanzanite Search Proves Geocachers are the Real Treasure

Last weekend wasn't just about chasing a highly-rated, elusive geocache; it was a testament to the thriving Brazos Valley Geocachers community! Following the initial "Tanzanite Investigation" blog post, two back-to-back events were held on the same day, proving that the real fun in geocaching is the friends we make along the way.

Part 1: The Social Hub at Tanzanite Lunch (GCBF8W8)

The day began with the Tanzanite Lunch, which served as the perfect social kickoff.

• Massive Turnout: The event attracted a fantastic crowd, with cachers noting there were "barely enough chairs and tables" and a search party of around 20 people afterward.

• Wider Reach: Geocaching friends gathered from all over, including visitors who traveled all the way from Pennsylvania!

• Building Community: As GeePa summarized, it was a great opportunity to "meet cachers from the College Station area that I have not run into before". The logs are full of thanks, proving it was a wonderful chance to swap stories and trade trackables.

Part 2: The Campus Cache Crawl Kickoff (GCBF9RR)

After a successful lunch, the group headed to the Campus Cache Crawl Kickoff event to tackle the caches themselves. The hosts, Brazos Valley Geocachers, welcomed everyone for a day of fun in Aggieland.

The highly anticipated mission began: the infamous Tanzanite cache.

• Collective Effort: The hunt for Tanzanite was a true team effort, with a large group of eyes searching. Logs show people looking "in the trash can, on all the nuts and bolts, on the sign, everywhere on the pipes" and "checking every Pebble within 10' of the posted coordinates".

• The Crawl Success: Even though the Tanzanite search yielded no results, the group quickly moved on. As PittPack noted, this was a "great event to get a group of us together to go after other caches around campus". Logs confirm cachers successfully hit other, less elusive campus hides, proving that a DNF couldn't ruin the fun.

As the photo above shows, even a DNF log is a team effort in the Brazos Valley!

Looking Ahead

The Brazos Valley Geocachers are a thriving, supportive group. Our passion for the game, for meeting up, for exchanging stories, and for tackling the hardest challenges together, is what makes this hobby so great.

Tanzanite may remain an elusive mystery for now, but the community it brought together is solid, active, and already planning the next great adventure!

From One Bucket in Oregon to 25 Years of Adventure in Aggieland

Geocaching began as a simple, bold experiment in the year 2000, starting with just a bucket hidden in the woods of Oregon. A quarter-century later, it has exploded into a global outdoor adventure loved by millions—and right here in the Brazos Valley, we quietly became home to some of the earliest and most historically significant caches in Texas.

Join us as we look back at the origins of geocaching, trace its path to our region, and highlight the oldest surviving caches still active right around us.

🌍 Global Milestones (2000–Present)

2000 — The Beginning of the Hunt

• May 3: Dave Ulmer hides the first geocache near Beavercreek, Oregon, marking the start of a phenomenon.
• September: Geocaching.com launches, listing 75 caches worldwide.
• Fall 2000: Groundspeak (now Geocaching HQ) is officially founded.

First Revenue? Believe it or not, the entire company started from selling a box of 144 Geocaching T-shirts!

2002 — CITO Is Born

The Cache In Trash Out® (CITO) initiative launches, growing into one of the most powerful environmental volunteer programs in the outdoor world:

• Over 333,000 volunteers have participated.
• More than 16,000 events have been hosted globally.
• Over 8,000,000 liters of trash have been collected.

2020 — Geocaching Reaches Mars

NASA's Perseverance rover launches with a trackable code included in its hardware. Geocaching officially becomes interplanetary!

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🤠 Geocaching History in the Brazos Valley

Geocaching reached Texas quickly in the early 2000s, and the Brazos Valley rapidly became a quiet but important pocket of activity. Early Aggieland cachers were hiding:

• Large ammo cans and hefty containers
• Themed virtual caches
• Containers that have now survived two decades exposed to the elements

Aggieland's Early Cache Boom (2001–2003)

Texas A&M's campus and nearby parks became home to some of the very earliest caches in Central Texas. These early hides truly reflected the era: big containers, demanding long hikes, and simple puzzles.

It is astonishing that some caches placed as early as 2001 are still active today, they are incredible relics that offer a genuine touch of geocaching's earliest years.

📡 The Brazos Valley Geocachers Group Forms

The BVGC community began gathering online in the early 2010s, with our Facebook group officially created in August 2014. Since then, BVGC has become a vibrant, energetic hub for:

• Event planning and meetups
• Sharing epic trail stories
• Hiding creative and challenging caches

From longtime veterans to brand-new cachers, the BVGC community has grown into one of the friendliest and geocaching groups in all of Central Texas.

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🗃️ The Oldest Geocaches in the Brazos Valley (2001–2002)

These finds are the historical backbone of geocaching in our region. Only four are Traditionals; the rest are early-era Virtuals, a style of cache that is no longer freely available to create today.

Code	Name	Type	Placed	Notes
🥇 GC49C	Lick Creek Cache	Traditional	March 15, 2001	The oldest surviving cache in the Brazos Valley—a true legacy hide.
🥈 GC966	Fallen Timber Cache	Traditional	May 5, 2001	A rugged early hide.
🥉 GCCEF	Lake Somerville Island	Traditional	June 15, 2001	A summer-2001 classic.
GC306A	Tribute to Courage	Virtual	January 2, 2002	Historic early virtual.
GC30BC	Yegua Park	Traditional	January 3, 2002	One of the earliest Somerville traditionals.

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❤️ Why This History Matters

These incredible caches tell the powerful story of how geocaching took hold in the Brazos Valley—long before the convenience of smartphone apps or elaborate swag items.

They represent:

• The pioneers who carefully hid the first containers.
• The early explorers who bravely searched with primitive GPS units.
• The foundational roots of our BVGC community.

Every time you find one of these historic caches, you are quite literally touching a piece of geocaching history,

And now, 25 years later, we are all part of writing the next exciting chapter! Happy Caching, Aggieland!

Posted by Brazos Valley Geocachers • Category: 🪶 Hides

Central Texas Geocaching Events Roundup — Winter 2025 Edition

Your official guide to what's happening around the region this season!

Winter is shaping up to be a surprisingly busy time for geocachers here in Central Texas. Whether you're looking for a quick road trip, a cozy meet-and-greet, or a full day of outdoor fun, there's something on the calendar for everybody — from Waco to College Station and beyond.

Here's a look at some upcoming events worth adding to your watchlist!

🌌 Winter Solstice 2025

GCBDRVF • December 21, 2025

Celebrate the longest night of the year with an event that embraces all things winter. Solstice events always have a fun, cozy energy—lots of chatting, twinkling lights, and usually someone sneaks in hot chocolate

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⭐ Looking Ahead: The 24th Annual Texas Challenge (MEGA)

GCB4F75 • March 14, 2026 — Taylor, TX

With hundreds already logged as "Will Attend," Taylor is gearing up to host a huge five-day celebration filled with GeoArts, vendors, the legendary team competition, BBQ, reunions, and more. Think of it as the Super Bowl of Texas geocaching—and the registration hype is already snowballing.

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📍 Closer to Home: December 7 in Aggieland

If you'd prefer to skip the road trip, mark your calendars! College Station has an entire luster of events happening on December 7th, making it an easy day for local cachers.

Featured College Station Events:

• KK's Kibbitz(GCBF8VM) - A casual gathering.
• KK's CITO at Veterans Park (GCBF8VV) - Give back to the community!
• Tanzanite Lunch Event (GCBF8W8) - Perfect for a midday break.
• Campus Cache Crawl Kickoff hosted by Brazos Valley Geocachers!

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🎒 Make Your Winter Cache-Plan

Central Texas always surprises us—one minute we're hosting a quiet event in a park, and the next minute a crowd shows up with Travel Bugs, trail snacks, and enough geostories to fuel a podcast episode.

If you're looking to stay active this season, now is the time to:

• Save the Dates for your favorites.
• Log your "Will Attends" so organizers can plan ahead.
• Consider pairing the events with a little caching road trip to boost your find count!

The weather is cooler, the events are plentiful, and the smileys are waiting. Happy Caching!

Posted by Brazos Valley Geocachers • Category: 🎪 Events