Where are they now?
seldom|seen
(by rawevil)
And the series goes on with another cacher a few of us have come to either be entirely frustrated by, or elated, once you find one of his caches. It took a bit of prodding to get this article but sometimes the tenacious rawevil can get the job done. Sometimes . . .
I talked about the Land of Selzzup in Sagasu’s feature article, but this is the granddaddy of them all in the Fox Valley. The one and only seldom|seen. And dangnammit if I always have to look at the keyboard to find that special character in his caching name! Personally, I thought this was much easier:
seldom|seen joined the geocaching community on 10-17-2006. We all have someone that gets us into this hobby and here’s a little known fact from the great puzzler himself:
“It was really Team QWERTY that introduced me to the sport, I think knowing I was bound to do something more with it [than] the traditional hide and seek. On our first outing we located a few simple traditionals and I remember asking him “that’s it?” You see I had worked with GPS equipment as far back as the late 80s for my Remote Sensing major and there was little novelty for me in using GPS [coords] to find things. Then he showed me I Have An Idea! GCRV5Y and the light bulb went on, literally. I don’t think he anticipated quite how much time or energy I would invest in the sport or how prolific I was going to be in the early years but he knew instinctively that I was going to become integral to the local geocaching scene. Now everyone knows who to blame :)”
This puzzler has only 1,008 caches found, 214 caches hidden, and 1,176 favorite points on his hidden caches. With 142 mystery caches and Sagasu as his guinea pig on those, this is what he had to say:
“Well, there’s certainly some truth to Sagasu being a Guinea Pig in the early years, especially during his Pavlovian FTF-chasing phase. Anyone who attempted an FTF or STF on one of my early caches faced certain frustration with coordinate accuracy and, more often [than] not, a puzzle build error that I missed or hadn’t quite worked the kinks out on. For the first few years I didn’t own a GPS unit and was building cache puzzles with [coords] from Terrabrowser using aerial spotting of finals which was less than accurate, shall we say. That, coupled with the complexity of some of the puzzle builds and typical proximity issues I found myself of working around, lent a certain degree of labrat testing to the chase.
Thankfully, over time, cachers like Sagasu, HuffinPuffin2, -cheeto-, gottarun and the like came to understand that this came with the territory and realized that the content and experience of going after an S|S cache was worth the occasional headache and helped me fix and soften the edges for fellow cachers as more puzzles emerged.”
Egads! What has this man created in the Fox Valley besides the Nadar | Head Case series? I can tell you a bit about that. He has held CITO events in High Cliff State Park, many of which I was a part of after joining the geocaching community. He is very into the environment and I appreciate that a lot. If anyone ever wants to debate his 5/5 CITO come at me; I was there. Been there and done that and I have the pictures to prove (https://coord.info/GC6CGPX) as do the others who were there that day.
So where is he now? I’ll let him tell you in his own words:
“It’s amazing to me that most of my caches are still active and still getting traction after a decade and a half. These days I am several steps removed from the sport and trying my best to stay on top of maintenance, though I am increasingly relying on active cachers to lend a hand if they see one missing or a wet log sheet that needs replacing.
These days my free time is spent on other community-based endeavors like championing the local public arts though the non-profit Sculpture Valley and working on local environmental and social policy issues as Alderman for District 9.
As any geocachers knows, our awareness of place and comprehension of local history grows with every cache discovery and I cannot tell you how many times a discussion about arts placement or parks improvement funding was informed as a result of my experiences chasing the many great caches in the Fox Valley and throughout the state of Wisconsin. I only wish I have more time to do more of it to continue building on the rich education this simple sport has given me. Cache On!”
I want to thank seldom|seen for all of the fun (well sometimes not) times I’ve tried solving his puzzles. Like Sagasu, one of his caches was very trying for us. It’s rated as a 5/5, and rightly so. I would highly recommend going after it if you have the courage: Seldom Seen’s Sloppy Seconds (https://coord.info/GC1G6D2) if you haven’t found it already. Also, back in 2018, he asked us if we would adopt one of his caches. If it wasn’t about the history of Oshkosh and a request from the man himself, it probably wouldn’t have happened. That caches is: War & Peace | Chief OisCoss (https://coord.info/GC67F6Y) if you are ever in the area. Thank you seldom|seen. The man, the myth, the legend!
