> How lame! The very first geocache and no one bothered to preserve it!
The
> cache page has absolutely no legitimacy to it at all. 
You may not be aware that Dave Ulmer, who hid that first cache,
renounced Geocaching about a month afterward. Three years later, his
comments on why he quit seem rather prophetic:
===============================================
From: "David J. Ulmer"
Date: Mon Jun 12, 2000 10:45pm
Subject: Problems with GeoCaching...
You really don't see the problems with a sport until you get deeply
involved in it. As the one that has placed the most stashes so far, I
began to seethe problems that it created. Some of my stashes are placed
on tree farms owned by a large corporation. They are not, No Trespassing
areas but they are private property. I didn't think too much about it at
first because woods is woods around here, and a cache bucket seems like
a pretty benign thing. The problem I saw was with the published
coordinates attached to an uninvited bucket attached to my name could
some day cause trouble. Some corporate dude five years from now could
decide to prosecute me for littering or something just for the fun of
it. For that reason I've decided to remove the stash buckets but keep
the coordinates that are interesting for another game....
===================
That may explain why the coordinates were munged and the cache archived.
> There is no description either.
There was no web site then, either.
> Anyways, I might be going to Washington this summer and thought it
would be 
> really cool to be able to find and sign the logbook on that very first

cache!
Well, you can always do this one:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=146
It's meant to "keep the flame alive" and it's only a few feet from
Ulmer's original spot.
> PS... Steve, how where you able to find those original coordinates?
I don't remember. I once ran across a link to either the Usenet
newsgroup (sci.geo.satellite-nav) where the original thread was posted,
or an archive of same. I can't find the thread on the newsgroup now. But
at the time I did record the waypoint in case we ever get back up that
way.
Steve
Team Tierra Buena