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Caving in Canmore
Geocaching
If you don't know what geocaching is, here's a primer:
A geocache is a container with small treasures inside of it, and
this container is hidden somewhere on planet Earth. The location of this container (or cache) is posted on the internet,
with certain clues to finding it, so that adventurous people with a GPS device can locate the cache and retrieve some treasure.
To make sure more people can also visit the cache, the person who finds it leaves their own little treasure.
Seem
simple enough? Well, let me tell you that coordinates don't necessarily mean it is an easy find. People go out of their
way to hide these things or make the hike to find them difficult.
September 15/2001 - McAley's Secret Stash
Well, the day after I placed the large rubber fly some people from Colorado took it as they went on a big geocaching expedition.
I checked to see if they also went to this cache called McAley's secret stash near the North Sask. and they not only had
visited it, but the left behind an AUTHENTIC GEOCACHING KEYCHAIN/COMPASS! Well, I was once again navigating this on the phone
as I visited Erron for lunch and she said she absolutely had to get this keychain. So off I went home to get her some pants
and hiking shoes so that after work we could go right away before such a great treasure was claimed.
After parking
I let Erron navigate us to this cache, it was a great hike down the north side of the river valley on a nice hot day. Erron
managed to find the cache quite easily under a broken tree and got her keychain in exchange for a Tub O' Marine Animals I
picked up the day before for whenever we next went geocaching.
September 13/2001 - Building42 Dogwalk
I went to this cache after dropping Erron off at work. It is located close to Millwoods golf course so it was on my way to
school. I managed to navigate geocaching.com on my phone and find the clues which said the cache was hidden in a hollow tree
stump. Lucky for me or I would have searched forever. Well it was a pretty easy find and the cache was much less disappointing
than the first. I left behind a large rubber fly I got from Galaxyland and took some cool temperature sensitive color changing
Silly Putty and a cigar.
September 3/2001 - Padukkam - our first cache
When we went caving Erron bought me an early birthday present which was a Magellan GPS315. I built my own PC interface cable
and downloaded the locations of about 50 Alberta caches. I was hoping to find one of a few in Banff, but we were too busy.
On the was back to Edmonton, passing Red Deer, I noticed that one cache was within 2km of the highway, and just as we passed
by Vlad and James in the other car we flagged them down to help us.
Well, normally you should have printed out
the hint sheet to make it easier to find the cache, but without it all we had to go on was the coordinates. And being new
to using the gps I wasn't always going in the right direction :) My leadership led us 3 times across a steep and muddy creekbed,
4 foot high grass and mosquitos galore, but eventually we found this cache. I was a little disappointed by the stuff in the
cache, so only left a playdium play card with maybe a dollar or two worth of credits in exchange for a puzzle cube.
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