A suspected pipe bomb proved to be just a false alarm Wednesday afternoon.
At approximately 2:46 p.m., the Juneau Police Department received a report of a suspicious device on a trail located approximately 400 yards off the Glacier Spur Road, said Lt. David Campbell in a press release. Patrol officers arrived and located the device, which was described as a 7-inch-long cylindrical tube wrapped in camouflage tape that appeared to be a possible pipe bomb.
The JPD Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) bomb squad arrived and disabled the suspected pipe bomb, Campbell said. Remnants of the object indicated that it was not an explosive device, but appears to have been a geo-cache.
Geocaching — which is popular in Juneau, with nearly 250 caches logged on the Geocaching.com website — is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a GPS device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches,” at specific locations marked by coordinates. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and sometimes a pen or pencil. The geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name, in order to prove that they found it. After signing the log, the cache is placed back exactly where the person found it.
