Welcome to the first installment of Lost and Trackable—a monthly series where I tell the story of one of my trackables that went out into the wild with great hopes, only to vanish somewhere along the way. Maybe it’s sitting forgotten in the bottom of a backpack. Maybe it’s in a drawer next to a handful of foreign coins and mismatched batteries. Or maybe, just maybe, it will resurface in a cache someday. But let’s be honest… probably not.
This month’s tale: The Racketeer Geocoin
Setting the Scene
Back in 2012, Doubleday (John Grisham’s publisher) released a special promotion for his novel The Racketeer. They minted 5,000 shiny Racketeer Geocoins and sent them out across the U.S. The goal was simple: let them travel far and wide, and along the way, geocachers could enter a photo contest on Grisham’s Facebook page.
No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. (Yes, even my trackable came with fine print.)
How It Began
On October 14, 2012, I “dipped” the coin into its first cache—just to start the mileage counter. For the uninitiated, dipping means you log it as having visited a cache, but you don’t actually leave it there. Think of it as stamping a passport without moving countries.
A few weeks later, I passed the coin along in person to a Canadian couple, hurleyanne, over breakfast. They became the coin’s first official couriers, and I had visions of it traveling the globe, racking up miles, and maybe even making its way back to me someday.
The Adventure
From there, the coin zigzagged across North America, hitching rides from cache to cache. Its travels looked promising—like the start of a John Grisham novel where you just know there are going to be twists and turns.
But unlike Grisham, the suspense here had no payoff.
The Vanishing Act
The last log for The Racketeer Geocoin was on May 29, 2015, when it was retrieved from a cache in California. And then—silence.
For nearly a decade, I’ve occasionally reached out to the last known holder, but I never heard back. At some point you just have to call it: the trackable is gone. Whether it was misplaced, forgotten, or quietly adopted into someone’s private collection (despite the description clearly stating “This is not collectible”), it’s no longer traveling.
So earlier this year, I officially marked it missing on Geocaching.com.
What’s Next?
Maybe one day it will reappear, dusted off and dropped into a cache by accident. Stranger things have happened. If not, I’ve considered re-creating the trackable using a copy of the book itself. At least then the story could continue, even if the original coin never returns.
In the meantime, you can still discover and log The Racketeer Geocoin using the code: JG40NV.
Closing Thoughts
Every trackable has a story. Some are epic journeys across continents, others disappear after a few miles. The Racketeer Geocoin falls somewhere in between—full of promise, cut short too soon.
And that’s the fun (and frustration) of trackables. Once you let them go, you never really know what’s going to happen.
Stay tuned for next month’s chapter in Lost and Trackable. Who knows which ghost of geocaching past I’ll dig up next?
Caching with Craig 