CCARS12

Well it was a great day of geocaching on Saturday! We did 21 caches in just under 12 hours including a couple that were not part of the CCARS12 new releases. We met up at Carburn Park in the Southeast where we spent about 90 minutes doing a trash pickup (also known as a CITO or Cache In Trash Out). If you are ever looking for a park for a family outing this is a nice destination. There are lots of picnic tables, a pond with ducks in it, a river to walk along or wade in and some nice caches to hunt down. We thoroughly enjoyed our walk along the riverbank looking for garbage and were quite impressed not to find all that much to pick up. We found our first cache in the park and, because it was not a CCARS12 cache we were able to look for it before the noon opening of the event.

We did several caches in the south of Calgary in areas I had never been before and this reminded us how caching can take you to places you might have missed even in your own city. And it is certainly a great way to get to know a city you have just moved to.

We looked for a cache called Pirates of the Elbow Treasure Chest and were rewarded with these amazing views. This was just South of the Glenmore Athletic Park and North of the Glenmore Reservoir. There were some steep climbs involved in finding this treasure chest but we came up with the goods and the kids enjoyed their loot!

Just West of this cache is the Weaselhead Natural Area and we saw herons, geese and a few deer down on the flats as we looked for a Murder in the Park cache and Rowlf the Dog cache.

One of our favourite caches of the day was called Go Fish and required us to actually fish the cache out of its hiding spot. Even the grown ups enjoyed this and we had to use our ingenuity to create a fishing device from what we had with us.

Did any of you take part in CCARS12? Have you done Caching events in other cities? Let me know what your favourite events have been. I'll share more of our big cache day later this week.

Quick cache find

Yesterday my daughter and I went out to find a geocache in our own neighbourhood. I had seen the listing on geocaching.com but, knowing it wasn't a difficult one, I wanted to wait for a day when we could do it together. Alana took the lead with the GPS receiver with a reminder to let it orient itself after she was out of the truck. Then she led us to the right tree and I spotted the container. It was a winter friendly hide (not buried under snow) and a good size container holding lots of swag for trading. We signed the log book, replaced the treasure with swag of our own and replaced the container where we found it. Then I remembered I had planned to photograph the container for my blog so we took it back out, moved to a spot that would not offer spoilers and took the photographs. You must remember when caching, that you don't want to give away the location of the cache to the next cacher or anyone checking the logs on-line, so don't put the actual hiding place in your photographs and be careful what you say when you enter your comments on-line. These unwanted hints are called 'spoilers' for a reason! If you want to make a comment that may give away hints there is a feature on the website that will encript your log so that only someone who wants hints can read it.

Welcome to geocaching

Welcome to my geocaching blog. My goal is to introduce more people to geocaching as a fun activity for families, a good date activity, a way to stay active when you retire or an excuse to get out and see the world!

Geocaching is the term for treasure hunting using handheld GPS (global positioning system) receivers. This game started in 2000 and has caught on around the world. There are even apps for cell phones so you don't need to buy a separate GPS.

I am a relatively new cacher as I have been searching for caches for three years but have only found just over 200 caches in three provinces. I started caching with my daughter and husband when we moved to Calgary and wanted to get a feel for the city. 

We started by checking out the world wide geocache website which is free to join. This site publishes the coordinates of all caches hidden in the world. You can locate caches nearest your home or caches in a destination to which you will be traveling.

Last summer we traveled to Waterton Lakes National Park geocaching along the way through Alberta and into the park. We made more stops and went down roads we may not have ventured if we hadn't had a mission! I hope I can help turn you onto this adventurous new sport.