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Caching down in MD again with EFAF and friends. I actually had another cache loaded at the start but since it was in the parking lot, I thought it was a mislabeled parking coordinate and deleted it. Woops! Weaton Regional Park is a nice place, and connects with Brookside Gardens which is even nicer. They actually have a small train ride over there but I forgot to get a photograph. We found two caches and didn’t find a third before the heat made us turn back. The last one said the terrain was “gentle and easy” and near the train ride station, but neither statement was true as I had to bushwhack over a creek with lots of brambles and fallen logs at the opposite end from the station (according to the coordinates). Then the cache wasn’t even there! I feel like maybe it was moved and the coordinates were not updated…or the description, either/or. Either way we got slurpees afterwards and decided it was worthwhile regardless. Or at least I decided it was worthwhile haha
GCGDPZ GC38BRA GCA663 GCA65F GCHK8Y GCA658 GCHK8W Went to Huntington State Park in Redding, CT. Took a 4 mile hike and found all 7 of the caches we set out to find. Normally we usually give up looking on one or two per hike, so this is a new record for us. One of the caches was messed with by some chucklefucks who stole (or burned) the logbook around their little battery campfire littered with ciggarette butts and left the cache sitting open on top of a rock. First really warm spring day today, we were about to fall over by the end, but it was a really great hike overall.
GC12EY3 GC12J1F GC2617F GC2617G GCQ1BY Took a trip to Hop Brook Lake in Middlebury, CT near where I grew up yesterday. We loaded up about ten caches and got to around half, two of them we were right on top of but couldn’t find them, though we didn’t look all that hard. The dam at the lake has always fascinated me, as a child we would take walks around the lake to the control tower and throw rocks down the spillway for fun.
GC311VK GCVPXB GC2JJZV EFAF here again. Once again, running around Rock Creek Park in Maryland with a friend! One of these caches was called arachnophobia. I didn’t let him know there used to be tons of spiderwebs there…since he’s arachnophobic! There weren’t any there now though so it went well. Lake Bernard Frank seemed to have really receded at one spot since everything was covered in dry mud. We could have crossed to the other side at the north part if we really wanted to. Was a great temperature for hiking though. All in all a good day.
GC9D7 GCRWF1 GCFAF6 We started off 2012 geocaching with a good long hike through the Westmoreland Sanctuary across the highway from Butler Sanctuary, which we hiked through last year. Trails were well marked, though there were a lot of trees in the way that needed to be climbed over. Stayed cool and cloudy the whole day, and only just started to rain as we were leaving.
As many of you in the world are no doubt experiencing, it’s winter and rather cold around here. We don’t get out much during the winter due to weather conditions and holidays, so you can probably expect us to be rather dormant around here until at least March.
You never know though - maybe we’ll go tromping around in the snow!
GCM7FG GC270HV GC13Z2V GC2QQ5Y Took a trip out of state today to go see our friend. She heard about our geocaching exploits and wanted to try it for herself. The High Mountain Park Reserve nearby seemed like the perfect place to take a first time cacher, miles of trails, lots of caches, and a really nice view of NYC from the peak of High Mountain.
EFAF here. Went down visiting a friend in MD and decided to do a bit of caching with him while I was here. I loaded up four caches but we ended up only going to two due to some bad trail decisions on my part. For the first cache, we searched all over the slope it was supposed to be on but only found a ragged ziplock bag with a pen inside and no cache. Hoped it wasn’t the remains of the cache, but I suppose only time can tell. The second one we ended up bushwhacking the whole way due to some trail construction (a lot of people in the comments said they did the same thing, so I thought it wasn’t so far from the Lakeside Trail to the cache). When we got there we found out that it was directly next to the Rock Creek Trail, a much easier trek than the one we just took. Oh well! We ended up taking that back to the car and calling it a day.
I’ve been looking for some kind of program to turn my GPSr tracks into nifty colorful maps. GPSVisualizer.com is about as good as I’ve seen so far. I keep trying to import directly to Google Earth and it crashes every time. This was today’s trip to Hardscrabble, colored by elevation, and the waypoints of the caches. Pretty neat.
GC12PJ1 GCR1Z3 Had a nice trip over to Hardscrabble Wilderness Area over in Briarcliff Manor. The temperature was perfect, and I think the leaves are about as good as they’re going to get. The nor’easter really did a number on the park, lot of downed trees and branches blocking the trail, so we cleared a bit of it off.
We dropped off Bones from our last excursion, and saw another cacher on our way back to the car.
This is the Garmin eTrex Venture HC, the GPS we use on our geocaching adventures. EFAF got this for me last christmas, and it’s been amazing. The build quality is great, battery life is superb, and extra features like sunrise and sunset times are very useful. I wouldn’t recommend anything else to fellow geocachers.
GCF527 GC1DDB So today’s caches were in Babcock Preserve over in Greenwich, CT. The lovely fall weather kept us quite cool, it’s a shame the trails were in a somewhat poor condition the further in you walk. The two ammo can caches were fun to find, and in the second we found a travel bug attached to Bones the beanie baby, placed by Team Bacmac (active cachers in the area) the weekend before. I’ll start bringing my camera again for the updates.
So this is the kit we use when we go geocaching. I throw it all in one of those crappy bright orange cinch sacks. The only thing I’m missing is an actual compass, but I feel pretty good having an extra set of batteries for the GPS. We chuck those bottle caps in caches we find for fun. The stamp pad is for stamping the log book when we find stamps in caches. I used to do a lot of letterboxing before I started geocaching, so finding a stamp in a cache is a big deal for me.
