The Best Geocache Ever!

The dad had a meeting on the Mexican Gray Wolf ("Boring Howard Meeting") in Prescott, AZ.  I went along with him, and we had an enjoyable time.  The evening we got there, we went looking for geocaches near our hotel.  I logged a "Do Not Find," on one, and I quickly got an email from the owners of the cache urging us to look for "Raven's Labyrinth" while we were there in Prescott.  They gave us the cache number, so we looked it up.  It had over 400 "likes."  It has the most "likes" of any geocache in the US, and is second only to one other in the world.

It was a mystery cache, and it started in a certain park.  The only other clue we could figure out was that it was in a gray lock box, and that the year Prescott was founded would unlock the box.  So we went to the park and started walking down a trail.

We found this little kiosk where people can get free maps to the walking trails in this park.   It's called Acker Park. Then the dad got to looking around and he found a lock box on the wall of the kiosk.  We put in the date, and it opened up!  Inside was a key.  That's all.  Just a key, and there weren't any instructions in it.

As we looked around, we noticed that the back of the display case for the maps had a lock.  We tried the key.  Voila!  It opened!  We lifted the lid up, and we found this labyrinth.  Immediately, a man's voice started giving us instructions.  (By the way, this guy clearly had a great sense of humor!)  When you get this far, you can log it as being found, but in order to sign the log book, you have to get a marble to a certain hole in the labyrinth.  There was a key inside that allowed us to unlock the  pitch and roll knobs that moved the labyrinth around to move the ball.  

This is the dad moving the ball around the maze.  

After we had both tried unsuccessfully to maneuver the ball to the hole, the dad finally struck pay dirt!  This door on the side popped open!  The voice gave us more instructions, and told us that we needed to put everything back before we shut the door, because once it shut, we couldn't open it again.

We signed the log book.

We took a couple of travel bugs, and then we shut the door.  After we shut the door, I realized I hadn't stuck the log book back.  Fortunately there was a phone number for us to call if there was a problem.  I called and left a message.  We locked the log book under the top of the labyrinth and left.  A little while later, I got an email from the cache owner who said he dropped by on the way home from work and fixed it.  All was well!  Whew!

After we had everything all locked up and were heading out, we noticed the two geocaching symbols tacked up by the "Welcome to Ravenland" symbol.  Best cache ever!!!