Have you ever picked up a hobby because a friend or relative was really into it? Did you try to see if they’re truly onto something?
Writer Yia Lor of Eau Claire did this with geocaching, an outdoor activity her late sister, Jer Lor, loved to do with her kids.
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My sister, Jer, was an epic geocacher. She wasn’t afraid of getting lost in fields, climbing through brush, or being greeted by spiders. Well, maybe she was a little, but she still went.
Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting activity where hiders and seekers come to play. Seekers like my sister use GPS-enabled devices to locate hidden containers called geocaches that include a logbook and sometimes trinkets to swap. In the Eau Claire area alone, there are almost 900 hidden treasures.
I’ve added geocaching to my list of things to do when I miss my sister. This was one of her favorite hobbies with the kids in her life, and though she’d ask me to tag along, I never did. There was something about needing to go off trail at times or searching aimlessly while strangers walked by that made me feel uneasy. My sister wasn’t shy though. She was all about finding the treasure.
One afternoon, my nieces asked if we could go to the park. We hadn’t ventured out much since my sister died, and this seemed like an easy enough feat to accomplish. When we arrived, one of my nieces said, “There’s a geocache here!”
A canister full of trinkets that writer Yia Lor came across while geocaching, an activity her sister, Jer Lor, loved to do. Photo by Yia Lor
Before I knew it, she was holding a canister that somehow magically appeared from the pines. The kids dug through for which trinket they wanted to keep while I scanned the logbook.
Then my eyes landed on my sister’s name. Jer.
I glanced up at the towering pines, maples and oaks. They likely greeted my sister, too, when she was here. I took a picture of her signature to create a stamp so she could go into every logbook I found from then on.
Jer Lor’s name listed on a geocaching logbook that her sister, Yia Lor, found near a park in Eau Claire. Photo by Yia Lor
The first time I went geocaching by myself was after it had rained. The ground was muddy, and mosquitoes were out in full force. I was not prepared in my shorts, T-shirt and flip flops, but I was missing my sister and felt the urge to go.
The geocaching app showed several treasures along the trails in my neighborhood. After parking, I navigated to the closest geocache but struggled to find it among the fallen branches. After the 10th mosquito bite, I moved along to the trails. As I got closer to the next geocache, I realized that it was hidden off trail. There I stood staring into the woods, swatting at the buzzing by my ear and debating with my sister.
“You want me to go in there?” I said. “There’s not even a way in.”
Just like Jer would have done though, I paved my own path. I moved branches out of my way and crawled alongside a moss-covered log in search of a geocache called the Knotty Potty Gnome. My sister would have loved that.
Yia Lor came across this gnome statue the first time she went geocaching alone. The stamp she added to the logbook includes the signature of her late sister, Jer Lor. Photo by Yia Lor
After almost losing one of my flip flops twice and my hair full of webs, I reached the end of the fallen log where I was greeted by a gnome sitting on a toilet. On the bottom of the sculpture, I unscrewed a tube to find the logbook and stamped my sister’s name. Together, we had found our first treasure.
It didn’t surprise me when Jer took the old pill bottles from my recycling bin and turned them into geocaches. She delivered them one day, suggesting I hide them. Instead, I put them inside a cupboard and forgot. After she passed away, I found them while cleaning. Jer had created over 20 geocaches filled with logbooks and trinkets. I opened each one, stamped her name into the logbook and thought of all the places my sister and I could hide them.
