January 2013 Geocacher of the Month

Special shout out goes to Tim Stewart, aka The Weasel, for being voted Geocacher of the Month.  Congrats Tim !

Here's how it all started for The Weasel, straight from the Tim's profile page on Geocaching.com.

Born and raised in Marion, IA. I originally started caching back in 2002 on a whim with a friend of mine. I instantly got hooked right away. My friend slowly got out of caching, so I carried on by myself. "Back in the day" as I call it, there were very few caches around and I was to a 20-30 mile radius that I had all the caches. I continued caching up until 2005 when I found out that my wife and I were expecting our first child. Well, a baby along with high gas prices and no near caches put caching on a back burner.

FORWARD TO 2008--I was up at Jon Gill park in Marion one October night with my wife and daughter and see somebody standing on the Gazebo railing. I thought to myself "He must be a cacher". I get home and check out the geocaching website, and sure enough there was a cache there. Well, I go to the back closet and dust off the caching equipment. I turned the power on my GPS and it was like it was saying "Welcome back old friend". Needless to say, "back in the day", we didn't have nano caches, so I was not sure what to look for. After contacting the owner (S K H), I found the cache and was instantly hooked again. I struck up an instant friendship with S K H and Ghöst after that, and Team Marion was created shortly after.

Some of the high points of The Weasel's caching career -

                           * Set a career high of 125 caches in a day (07/02/11)

* Completed my first 5-5 cache (FTF) (01/03/09)

* Was the first to complete Bellcurves 16 stage "Gift" series (4 FTF's)

* Found caches in 3 states (IA, WI, and IL) in one day (01/18/09) Thanks BB!!!!!

* Completed the ENTIRE Rock Island trail with SuperGoober (approx 122 caches) (3 trips to complete, finished on 09/12/09)

* Completed the Iowa Well Rounded Cacher (Fizzy Challenge) with SuperGoober (MANY miles and MANY caches. Completed on 03/06/10)

* Completed the Iowa "5-Terrain Challenge" with SuperGoober (ALL 9 difficulty 5 terrain caches on 05/15/10) 

Again - hooray to Tim for the big win.