Tochi's Hut

With three finds under my belt, I am now pretty much an official geocacher. Geocaching, in a simple fashion, is a treasure hunt, whereby one is given the GPS coordinates of the treasure. There are many flavours and twists to this concept, but general premise is the same. Steal the treasure and log it.

Kung introduced me to this sport by telling me about the adventures of his geocaching pal in Nevada. I read up on it a while back and didn't give it too much thought. A few weeks back, I mentioned geocaching to some wannabe detective. All of a sudden, after spending agonizing hours coming up with the alias "MrMonk", the dude went crazy and starting hunting from the wee hours of the morning to past the dusk hours of the night. Not wanting to fall too far behind, I signed on-board too.

Things didn't start too rosy for me. For some reason, I decided to pick a rather difficult cache. It was a multi-cache (MC), where the first cache will provide clues or coordinates to a second one, and so forth, until you get to the final cache. This particular MC hunt was in German Mills Park. I've driven by it so many times, and was always curious at what laid at the end of Leslie St.

In terms of gear, the basic tool of the trade is a GPS. I don't have one. So really, I was totally screwed for this MC hunt. I had the coords for the first cache, but would need to go back to a computer to look up any new coords I picked up. But what the heck. Armed with a gMap printout of the first location, I headed to the park after work. The first hint was a Christmas tree. The cache is suppose to be an ammo box. I spotted the LONE evergreen in that area (matched perfectly with the printout) and searched literally everywhere around it for 20 minutes. The cache wasn't freaking there!

Came back home rather disappointed, I was scolded for not reading the log entries left by fellow geocachers on the cache's website for hints. I thought it was really cheating to read all that, but apparently, not having a GPS was a good enough "excuse". LOL.

One of the entries read: "We found the first stage quickly, but it was nestled right against a birds nest, and the bird flew out as we reached in to retrieve the coords." OMG. I looked everywhere around and under the tree, but didn't look in or up the TREE! I didn't even notice a bird's nest earlier. big SIGH.

I went back the following day feeling rather confident. Got back to the tree, and easily spotted the bird's nest! There were younglings in the nest, barely able to open their eyes! One of their parent got scared as I approached the nest, flew off and was observing me from this post.

Back to the cache, I looked everywhere in the tree, and everywhere around the tree again. NO CACHE! WTF. Someone must have stolen the cache or something. It was bad too, as I wasn't as careful this time - accidentally brushed my naked skin against some stinging nettles. My arm and hand were itching like crazy for the rest of the night.

I was more pissed than disappointed. I spent two days looking for one cache and failed, while my arch-rival MrMonk had found FIVE caches in two days.

Anyway, since I had to head down to Ithaca over the weekend, I decided to read up on the caches around my alma mater. Found a couple "ideal" candidates that might be simple enough to find. Ended up discovering my first ever cache by Uris Library and the clock tower. It was a little key holder box, and nicely hidden in a pretty obvious location. There were a lot of muggle families around taking photos with all the graduate candidates, so I had to be rather careful and discrete when retreiving and restoring the cache.

By the time I got back to Canada, MrMonk was already up to TWELVE caches. WTF. I decided to tackle a simpler cache in the same German Mills Park. I picked up the coordinates and was pretty sure I was in the right area of the forest. I found the supposed tree stump with the cache, but could not spot the cache. I looked around for a while and came back to the stump, stepping on some logs around it. All of a sudden, one of the logs gave way slightly under my feet. I quicky jumped away and removed the log. The cache was sitting underneath in plain sight! I had almost crushed the cache by accident. haha.

Lots of goodies in this cache. Left a silver "Learning Science" pencil I had from teaching some grade 8 kids a while back. I didn't have any better toys, haha. I took a tiny bumble bee eraser from the cache.

Overall, GeoCaching has been pretty fun. There are a surprisingly large number of caches in the area. It is kind of amazing how so many "treasures" are hidden all around us. The best part is that these hunts often brings you to local areas that you have never realized existed.

My current stats: 3 caches FOUND in TWO countries.