Cyber Cache in the Woods

Welcome to my new Blog, we will see how well I can keep this up!
I am achually posting this on Saturday 29, 2005 but I thought I would back-date it to make more sense in the grand scheme of things.

One thing I will log here are the geocaches I find. If you do not know what geocaching is check out www.geocaching.com because they describe it better than I do.

John, Magnum the dog, and I headed out from his house in -10c weather to find our first cache ever. I had downloaded the coordinates from geocaching.com and was still figuring out how to work the GPS as we walked towards the hiding location. The website showed the cache to be inside Toogood pond so it seemed to be an easy first find because we knew the area like the back of our hands.

Link to Cyber Cache in the Woods

John's Prediction: The cache would be an area we once had a fort in and bike jumps. I remember as kids we used to go there with Bryan, Louis, Young Min, and Mason. This area once has bricks we stole (I can't remember were we got them) as a ground cover.

Things I learned about my GPS (Garmin etrex vista c)
1) It must be held level or it complains to you
2) There are only 6 buttons all of which do different things depending on the menu
3) The unit will switch to white on black screen for night time viewing automatically. I'm guessing it does this by calculating the time the sun will set on that day. Pretty crazy stuff.
4) The unit will beep when you approach the location of the cache but if you had the unit in a backpack you may not hear it.
5) It gets really exciting when you are approaching the cache and the Time to Destination and Distance to Destination are counting down very fast.

Anyways as we were walking I mistook the ETA at Destination to be how long will be until we get there. Instead it tells you the time you will get there, at this case it was about 17:30. John kept insisting something was wrong because the ETA either stayed the same or went up instead of down. I figured out how to get the unit to display Time to Destination and that made more sense.

The hardest part of the walk was crossing the field behind Unionville Public School because it was fluffy snow covered with a thick sheet of ice. When you stepped down into it your foot would get stuck under the ice layer and almost pull your boot off or twist your ankle. Magnum was able to scoot across the layer of ice with no problem probably because he can distribute his weight across more of a contact patch with the ice. John took off at one point with magnum across the ice and I had a flashback of when I was a kid.

FLASHBACK:
Running across same field, same ice layer with fluffy snow underneath and falling. I remember that I fell running at full stride and when I impacted the ice layer my arm slid under the ice into the snow and my collar bone hit the edge of the ice straight on. It hurt a lot.

We overshot the cache the first time because we were on the wrong path on the wrong side of the river. You have to be careful in the woods with snow cover because a frozen river looks just like a snow covered path. It turns out we had seen the correct path the first time but guessed wrong on which way to go.

We found the site where the cache was located and it turns out John's prediction was correct. The cache took about 5 minutes to find and was in the upturned root structure of a fallen tree.

Cache: large tupperwear container filled with various computer related items, old games, and a log book.

I tried reading the logbook but it was too dark and we had not packed a flash light (stupid!). The next person to read the logbook will think I'm retarded because I could not even read what I was writing, in fact I think I wrote that! I was a bit quick in opening the container and discarded leaves which were frozen to the lid. John got mad at me for doing this so I put them back on when I replaced the container. I think he was just crusty that day.

Lessons Learned
1) Pack a flash light
2)Keep GPS level
3)Read the manual a bit more
4)Put more than one geocache in the GPS at a time so future outings can be planned on the walk home
5)Stop focusing on the Time to Destination, it is like waiting for water to boil
6)Resist urge to cross frozen river as short cut to cache! I almost did it!

This is the log I left on the cache's page

LOG ON SITE:
Cyber Cache
by Cyber_Stingray [profile]
N 43° 52.457 W 079° 19.380
December 26, 2004 by oldnumber7 (1 found)
Found this with my friend John and dog Magnum. My first find and it was getting very dark. I could barely read what I was writing in the log book. I took nothing and left nothing. What is funny is that as kids we used to build bike jumps and camp fires in that exact area. We even had "borrowed" bricks for ground covering.