Welcome!!!!

You have reached the homepage of the Michigan Geocaching Organization (MiGO). The purpose of our organization is to promote the sport of Geocaching in Michigan via improved communications and to provide information to the public about our activities and the sport of geocaching. Please spend some time on our site. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us or visit www.geocaching.com for more details.

Join MiGO Today! Membership gives you many benefits. MiGO is one of the oldest and most respected Geocaching organizations in the country. Since our inception in April, 2002 we have grown both in size and stature. In 2007 we were granted an organizational land use permit by the Michigan DNR. This permit enables MiGO members to place caches on permitted DNR lands, with the appropriate permit where required, at no fee. This is just one of the many benefits of your membership. You'll also become part of a local and tight-knit Geocaching community with an active interest in caching in our state. Members have access to our forums and are encouraged to participate. We also have a very active Facebook Group which is a great place to meet cachers and learn the game.

To Join, renew or upgrade your membership, pull down the Membership Menu.

Announcements

The ZFC Winners Photo Op Contest rolled out at the end of January. This is all-year contest for winners of the monthly ZFC Photo Contests. See the announcement below.

The Pick Your Poison contest is open for entry and will runs March 1st through May 31st. See March Promotions for more. The score at the end of March is displayed on the contest page.

The April ZFC Photo Contest photos are scrolling below. The Member Ballot is open through May 4th. The May contest is also open.

Zoom... Focus... Click! - May 2023
Congratulations to:
1st Place -Paddling Pirates Mrs Pirate
2nd Place - aghudley
3rd Place -mermaidsh
Honorable Mentions: Fallen231 & LiteOnCache

Prizes will be created and mailed shortly.

A new photo winner and a new photo honorable mention this month. Thank you all for entering. We still had a hard time attracting judges.

Lake Superior Member 2023 Geocoin.

Another beautiful Chris Mackey design. This is the preliminary artwork for the 2023 version of the Lake Superior Member Geocoin. All Lake Superior members get one of these coins as part of their membership.
If you are not in the renewal cycle and you want to upgrade your membership to Lake Superior, use the Upgrade process in the Membership menu.

The coins will be ordered December 1st for delivery by Winter Social 2024. Become a Lake Superior Member or renew your Lake Superior Membership between December 1st, 2022 and November 30th, 2023. Use your Additional Data in your profile to tell us how to get your coin to you, to express your interest in purchasing additional copies and if you want yours personalized.

The MiGO 20th Anniversary Geocoin is available to order in the MiGO Store. Get yours before they are gone.

May Promotions

ORB GeoTour Kickoff
May 20th, 21st, 2023

One GeoTour, Two Counties!

One Weekend, Two Events,

Start your adventure!
GCA41NG ORB GeoTour Launch Event
9:30 AM, West Branch Visitors Bureau

Collect your prize?
GCA41NJ ORB GeoTour: Weekend Wrap-up!
Au Sable River Center, Roscommon

One Beautiful Locale, Two Great Hosts

https://www.visitwestbranch.com

https://visithoughtonlake.com

Download and print your passport to start this great adventure...
ORB GeoTour Passport

March - May Promotions

Geocaching Contest

In this contest you will be picking your own challenges to complete. There are ten challenges in each of four categories. The categories correspond to various poisons ranging in strengths and difficulties. Do one, do ten, do some in each category or do them all. This is a longer than usual promotion to give you time to complete as many as you want. There are prizes along the way and more prizes at the end. Click the button below for details.

Pick Your Poison Contest Page

Congratulations to the Pick Your Poison Winners:

Most Points Scored: DirtBikeGranny with 116 points scored. DirtBikeGranny gets first choice of one of the three prize coins, plus bragging rights for an impressive accomplishment.

First Drawing Winner: woofer and tweeter, wins a one-year extension of their MiGO Membership, plus second choice of one of the three prize coins.

Second Drawing Winner: mermaidsh wins the third of the prize coins.

Third Drawing Winner: fallin' . Since we did not have Trial or Lake St. Clair members complete a challenge, we had a third drawing for a choice of four items from the MiGO Store, a 20 Year Coin, a Hiking Stick Medallion, MiGO Name Badge or a set of Winter Social 23 pathtags. Send an email to store@mi-geocaching.org to select your prize.

The Pick Your Poison contest proved to be a difficult, yet popular contest. 13 players completed 10+ challenges. 4 players completed 20+ challenges and one, DirtBikeGranny, scored 34 of the 40 challenges. Woofer and tweeter scored 28 challenges, fallin' scored 27 and vj24 scored 20.

It was difficult for players to keep their finds straight and avoid duplicating finds in more than one challenge. It was also challenging to score because of all of the errors people made. The contest manager made every effort to help players correct mistakes and most were handled. Should MiGO present a contest in this format in the future, we try to supply players with a spreadsheet that can be used to track progress and identify problems.
Thank everyone for playing.

On an unhappy note, the MiGO Challenge Work Group had to disqualify a player for deliberately and egregiously ignoring the rules of fair play, the common contest rules and a rule specific to this contest. MiGO does not police how people play the game on their own but does expect players of our contests to follow our rules. Entering contests is an agreement by a player to play by the rules we put forth. Failure to do so impacts everyone else in the contest. It is the responsibility of every player to be familiar with the rules.

ZFC Winners Photo Op Contest
A contest just for MiGO Photo Contest Winners:

This is the long promised, year-long contest for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners of the Zoom-Focus-Click Photo Contest. It is a bit like a travel bug race, with a twist: We are counting photos, not miles.

What is the object?

Get photos posted on your ZFC trackable's web page. The more photos, the more points.
The contest runs for the calendar year, starting at the January publish date, through December 31st, 2023. It is open to all ZFC prize winners (first, second and third Place) of the ZFC Photo Contest from November 2020 through June 2023. July and later winners will be eligible for the contest in 2024. The playing pieces are the ZFC Trackable tags that were the prizes for the photo contest. There are multiple ways to score more points, and more ways to win prizes.

This contest is open only to ZFC prize winners. Others are welcome to look, but to play, you must first finish in the top 3 of a monthly ZFC Photo Contest. Access to the contest page is through a private Announcement Forum for the contest. All members who are qualified to play will get an invitation to the contest page via email.

ZFC Winners Photo Op Contest

May 25th, 2023

4th Anniversary

GT93
7555 Favorite Points

51225 finds by

8109 cachers

Still Going Strong

Running through 9/24/24

As many of you know, our own "Kneel More" is an avid and prolific filmmaker with regards to the game of Geocaching. Kneel and his friend Bob Billy have dozens of informative and often hilarious videos in his YouTube collection. Kneel has created a series of videos while caching the MSPC GeoTour. To view the videos, click on the images below.

DNR Centennial Geocache Trail -
Trust the Tradition

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is celebrating its Centennial year in 2021. Jay's Sporting Goods is celebreating their 50th anniversary. To celebrate, The DNR is partnering with Jay's Sporting Goods with help from MiGO putting together a geocache trail (not a GeoTour) of fifty caches in four regions of Michigan, one region at a time. Jay's is supplying the actual geocaches that will be hidden with our assistance. Search the state for caches named "DNR TTT - Adventure" in their name.

We want to recognize the following cachers for stepping up to help. Numbers in parenthesis indicate multiple sites:

2277, aghudley, Bainers1103, bgscrabble, ccsquire, Cinamuck, coolmamaof5, DanTMan&Co (2), Gdpunkgirl73, Grayseelou' HelloLola, iatsemedic, IFollowRoads, K&A Enterprises (2), kirtlandii (2), kitedancer, LiteOnCache, Loumiester, Mermaidsh, Piperollie1, Pirate Sunflower (3), Ranger4+1, redwings01win, SeasonsGuide (3). Stuffedcabbage, Team Nix (2), The Macho Homemaker, theworldisoutthere (5), TJPost (2), Traveling Dave, usyoopers (5), Ypsimom (2).

We would also like to recognize the following additional cachers who volunteered as backupsfor the primary hiders:

beenhere, DirtBikeGranny, epoch13, Working4Cache

Thank you all so much for helping bring this joint effort to fruition.

More From MiGO

Promote MiGO on your Geocache Page

MiGO members are encouraged to identify geocaches as being owned by a MiGO Member. We have had a page containing sample logos and other graphics for MiGO Cache Owners to include on their own cache pages. Recently, HQ tightened their security, breaking many COs links to graphics and other pages. Neither our old host or our new one were included in the acceptable list.

The good news is, we have placed the graphics on our own Google Drive space and updated the page with the logos and code to go with them.

The bad news is, we would like all of our members to update all geocache pages that used our older host with code for the new location of the graphics.

Click the link below to see what is available and copy the new code to your cache pages.

Add a MiGO Logo to your cache page

Welcome to our new officers:

Our new Executive Committee Secretary: Robb Lamer (CCSquire),
Our new Executive Committee Member At Large, Peter Hoyt (KazooOtters).
Our new Southeast Regional Vice President, Grace VanCamp (Grayseelou).
Our new Southwest Regional Vice President, Sarah Johnson (Sarahjo27)

Congratulations to:

Our new Executive Committee President, Jodi Spalding (LiteOnCache). Jodi has been on the EC as a Member At Large and most recently, Vice President.
Our new Executive Committee Vice President, Dan Cable (DanTMan&Co). Dan been a Member At Large.
Our new 5th Chapter Vice President, Joel Wilkins (iatsemedic). Joel also continues as an EC Member At Large

And a huge THANK YOU to outgoing officers:

Executive Committee Member, Steve Bassette (RemSpec), who served 5 years as MiGO President.
Executive Committee Member, Nikki Wolfin (Nikkiwolf25) who served 5 years as a Secretary.
Southeast Regional Vice President Laura Lisiscki (llski) who led (2022) and contributed (2023) Winter Socials.

Bios for our Board Members, Executive Committee Members and Regional Vice Presidents can be found on the Leadership page under the About menu.

2023 Silver Coin Awards

Congratulations to the 2023 Silver Coin Award Winners:

Lou Ann Cousinaw, a.k.a. DirtBikeGranny
Robert and Claudia Councell, a.k.a. RDC4106
Joel Wilkins, a.k.a. iatsemedic

The full text of the awards can be seen at: Silver Coin Awards 2023
The list of past winners can be seena at: Silver Coin Award List

MiGO Susan K. Schug Scholarship

The winners of the 2023 Susan K. Schug Scholarship were announced at the 2023 Winter Social. They are.

$300 - Jared Christensen, a junior at Lake Superior State University, study wildlife conservation focusing on fish and their habitat. Jared is the son of member Barb Christensen, Fabulousfour1975.

$150 - Sara Landon, RoaminThirtiesGirl, a MiGO Member. Sara is working towards finishing an Associates Program in Accounting at Lake Michigan College.

$150 - Kollen L. Dault, a freshman at Mott Community College, studying Nursing. Kollen is the son of member Janice Dault, babybluejay.

Notable Membership Activity over the Last Two Months

Trial Members

Spark of ingenuity (new)
SpeersOhana (new)
lavapaw (new)
ClanDuVall (new)
C0sm0Cacher (new)
Robincat (new)
MrandMrsMan (new)
Boom_Boom_143 (new)

Lake Huron

king tut (renew)
Paddling Pirates (Mrs. Pirate) (renew)
Teambaker101 (renew)
Fabulousfour1975 (renew)
zekefritter (renew)
pee-paw + mee-maw (renew)
dnmadden5776 (new)
catgirldo (new)
SP500 (renew)

Lake Superior

WanderLost22 (renew)
NextStep_ (renew)
woofer and tweeter (winner)
GeoKev93 (renew)
Wandering Tracks (renew)
Stinky and Stinky (renew)
Allen Cachers (renew)
Fallen231 (ren&upg)
beenhere (renew)
CCSquire (renew)
Hooked On U (renew)
ReichyDDom (renew)
Rae-of-Sunshine (renew)
UsTwo (new)
NightTrails (renew)
liskiss17 (renew)
8_is_Enough (renew)
Red Hat Grandma (renew)
Noah's Peeps (renew)
Cinamuck (renew)
DirtBikeGranny ()
IFollowRoads (ren)
MrandMrsMan (renew)
mkettel (renew)
angelsunshine (renew)
SnoringEagles (renew)
Dmw2m (renew)
Traveling Dave (renew)
Sl0ther (renew)
LarryRobyn (renew)
salplus2 (renew)
Trailmixymel (ren&upg)
lightkeeperJane (renew)
IdaLabs (renew)
mboensch (renew)
TSR_TeamStellaRick (renew)
MoDaRiMa (renew)
Team Nix (renew)
Ranger4+1 (renew)
candzsloot (renew)
Woodtrain (renew)
TheDeeJays (ren&upg)
OakCrestGal (renew)
scook (renew)
The Seed Spreaders (ren&upg)
snowflower722 (new)

Lake Superior
Honor Roll