Not every day you walk along a highway carrying a telescopic ladder over your shoulder. But geocaching sometimes brings you to exactly those situations you never imagined when you first started out.
Let me paint the picture: the E10 winds through a landscape that shifts between grey mountain faces and still fjord waters. It’s the kind of road where the horizon always promises something new around the next bend, where you rarely think about people actually stopping here — that there could be any reason to slow down and step out of the car. Traffic flows steadily past. And then — right in the middle of this ordinary roadside scene — a man trudging along the hard shoulder with a folded telescopic ladder over his shoulder.
That was me.
A little background — for those new to geocaching
Geocaching is a form of modern treasure hunting that takes place all over the world. Someone has hidden a small container — a “cache” — somewhere out in the world, logged its coordinates on geocaching.com, and it’s your job to find it using GPS. Inside the container there’s usually a logbook where you sign your name as proof that you found it. It sounds simple. It isn’t always. Some caches are placed in locations that require climbing, diving, kayaking — or, in this case, a telescopic ladder.
What on earth are you doing with that?
I noticed the cars slowing down. Some clearly eased off the accelerator — not because the speed limit demanded it, but because the sight was too strange to just drive past without a puzzled glance. A ladder. Far from the nearest house. Far from the nearest roof. Far from anything that could reasonably need a ladder. Around me: mountains, water, a few scattered birch trees with leaves just beginning to turn. And me — with the ladder.
What on earth is that guy planning? That was probably the question rattling around in more than one driver’s head that day.
The answer was, of course, that there was a geocache hidden up there. High up. In a treetop right by the road. Placed by someone who knew it would take a bit more than an outstretched arm and hope — and who had probably pictured exactly this situation when they hid it.
The preparations nobody sees
Geocaching taught me early on: you sometimes do things that look completely pointless to everyone except yourself. You stare intently into a pile of rocks by a motorway. You crouch beside a road sign in bright sunshine while tourists photograph you with bewildered looks. You spend five minutes studying a perfectly ordinary stick. And then — in this case — you carry a ladder out into nature to a spot where there is nothing to lean a ladder against. Except the tree.
I remember studying the cache description at home the evening before. “Requires equipment” it said, with a D3/T5 difficulty rating. I knew what that meant. And still — as I loaded the ladder into the car the next morning and drove off along the E10, the slanting morning sun laying a stripe of gold across the fjord, I had a small knot in my stomach. That mixture of excitement and ridiculous self-consciousness that geocaching serves you on a regular basis.
The moment itself
When the ladder was finally up against the trunk — a little unsteady on the soft forest floor, but good enough — and I climbed the first rungs, something happened that tends to happen in geocaching: all the absurdity falls away. You’re just there. Focused. The birds in the trees around you, the smell of moss and damp bark, the sound of cars passing down on the road — all of it recedes. You’re searching.
And up there, well hidden between branches and bark, there it was. Small, watertight, with a damp logbook inside. I signed — hands trembling slightly, more from concentration than from any fear of heights — pushed the cache back into place, and carefully climbed back down.
A car slowed down again just as I was folding up the ladder. The driver gave me a long look. I gave him a friendly nod. Sometimes that’s the best explanation there is.
Why do we do this?
I thought about it on the way home — the ladder loaded back into the car, the log updated, that familiar quiet satisfaction settling in my chest after a found cache. What is it that drives someone to carry a ladder along a highway, climb up a tree, just to sign a small roll of damp paper?
The answer is: it’s fun. That’s the simple truth. Because solving a slightly absurd challenge, preparing properly, seeing it through and succeeding gives a satisfaction that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t tried it. Because geocaching pulls you out of the car and into the landscape — along the E10, up mountain sides, beside fjord edges — and reminds you that there’s always something to discover out there, hidden in a treetop right by the road.
And because the man with the ladder along the E10 — that slightly odd figure who made drivers wonder — came home with a good story. He wouldn’t have, without the ladder.
Have you ever used unusual equipment to reach a cache? Share it in the comments — I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one who has looked a little strange along a Norwegian roadside.
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