Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes

Dragon Fly

2006-06-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

Took this nice picture of some kind of Dragon Fly in the Rouge Valley using my new FujiFilm FinePix S9000. I used a tripod, cable release, F4.3, ASA/ISO 80 setting on Aperture Priority mode. I was not sure if this kind of insect would bite me because there were about 20 of them buzzing around.

Bruce Trail Waterfalls

2005-10-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

N 43° 38.866 W 079° 56.511
Does the sun ever shine in the Bruce Trail? I have no idea because I have never seen it sunny in this place! Again we headed out on an overcast day into the 800km long trail system.

First thing we did was head over to Halton Hills Trail Cryptic because we had decoded the Cryptic Crossword clues in the two micro caches and we were dieing to see where this one was! Turns it it was in the spooky forest we had seen last trip but on the other side of the trail. The forest was not so spooky this time because the roots of the trees were covered with leaves. We grabbed the cache and took some pictures.

There was some very strange tree fungus growing on stumps and tree limbs. I have no idea what this is but it looks disgusting.

Next up was The Falls Tour: Snow Falls North, Snow Falls West (Traditional Cache) . Boy was this one a hard cookie to crack. We were all over this large rock for what seemed like an hour before reading the clue. Even with the clue we took a lot more time to find it! The falls here were very nice.

After lunch we headed over to The Falls Tour: Silver Creek (Traditional Cache) to find the container damaged and the contents soaking wet. The falls here were nice and the stone bridge was a great surprise!

It was getting late by the time we headed over to 20 Tonnes Falls . I'm not sure what to make of this location except it sure is disappointing for what its name implies! The whole reason this is called 20 tonne falls is because the bridge can have a weight limit of 20 tonnes. We did not find this cache.

Why did this post come out in 3 different fonts and sizes? I don't know, ask Blogspot which seems to hate me. EDIT: Blogspot is a piece of garbage. Why can't they get an image importer which doesn't suck shit?

Bruce's Mill

2005-10-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

Took a walk around Bruce's Mill on a fine sunny afternoon.

Halton Hills & Limehouse

2005-10-12T20:03:00.000-07:00

N43 38.047 W79 58.487
Halton Hills and Limehouse
Wendy and I

Beautiful downtown Halton Hills with its suburbs, paths, and haunted evil forest of doom! Again we drove in rain the 50 minutes to HH after about 3 false starts. The paths are well groomed in this area with cedar chips instead of gravel or pavement. I enjoy variety in my path coverings almost as much as I enjoy variety in my beer.

After realizing the GPS wanted me to drive my car though a narrow access tunnel under a rail road bridge we decided to walk to the trail head. We arrived at what I thought was the first stage of Halton Hills Trail Cryptic and found the cache in about 3 seconds.

The cache was a film like canister with the top of a rusty bolt attached to it. I think I remember seeing one just like this in BC but I might have just seen it on the website forums.

We read the clue which was a Cryptic Crossword clue in the Anagram style. Very annoying because we both had never done one of these Cryptic Crosswords before. A call to my father at the store proved no help because it turns out we were at the wrong cache. This was in fact the second cache in the Omission Style. Tisk Tisk!!

So we continued on and found Tylor Cache which was very disappointing if not for the atmosphere. The forest here is twisted and evil with strange roots strangling each other under foot. The bark on the trees grows in wave like patterns and rotting corncobs are everywhere. Tons of broken glass and discarded pieces of clothes hang from trees like some kind of dry cleaner went bezerk.

Back we went and found the Anagram part of the Cryptic Crosswords cache which we solved to be "Aides". This reminds me of that South Park episode where Jerrid the Subway guy admits he used personal trainers to get fit, or as he calls them aides. He says that he will personally give aides to every person in the town but of course they hear the word without the "e" and freaked out. I love South Park.

Next we drove over to beautiful downtown Limehouse which was draped in fog. We were on our way to the Bruce Trails to find The Gathering which turned out to be the featured hike on the website. Parking was easy at the baseball diamond because we were the only living being in that part of town. After a nice turkey wrap lunch (too much turkey!!) we walked around the back of the diamond and found a small path. Following the path we were soon in for a big surprise.

Holy crap, the ground is broken! Thats what we thought as we saw dozens of deep fishers breaking the land into slices. They ran as far as we could see in every direction and as deep as 40 feet at least! The entire side of the escarpment was slowing breaking away and crumbling into the gorge below.

Walking a bit more we found a ladder descending into the crevice, how could we turn this down? Down we went into the abyss! Side note: why is this image uploader being such a piece of shit? UPLOAD MY PICTURE YOU LOOSER THING! Ah, there we go.

So, as I was saying, we descended into what seemed like the bowels of the earth. The view down here was pretty impressive dark shadows below and bright light above. Most of the area was pretty accessible but we didn't push our luck for fear of becoming stuck.

We found the cache after descending the ladders for about the 10th time and following the clue more carefully. There was a dinosaur, a turtle, and some other thing guarding the cache.

We took a short stroll down the path but it was getting late and we headed back to the car.

N43 39.652 W79 50.612

On the way home we decided to stop by a church we had seen from the road on the trip up.

The church turned out to be a Ukrainian church and looks very cool.

Into the Bruce Trail

2005-10-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

N43 37.779 W79 58.702
Decisions, decisions.

Bruce Trail Association has a very nice looking website I must say. Apparently there is a shit load of trails in there going nowhere in particular. The thing spans like 800km and covers a few dozen great lakes.

In fact, if your not part of the Bruce Trail you better get your Little Trail ass out of town because its go big or go home time here!

Wendy is coming over real soon and we will sort this whole mess out. This kind of outing requires hours of dedicated planning by professionals at the top of their game. Its a good thing we know what we are doing, sometimes.

Edmond (or something or other) King Forest

2005-10-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

N44 03.624 W79 18.509
Dad and I

20 minute drive through spitting rain. Its amazing the housing developments that are going in. The Urban Sprawl is coming!!

Parked at above coordinates and read the informational sign. Apparently they have classes here once a month for people to learn about these forest preserves. Into the forest we went, but which way to go? Pick a direction, ok here.

Ground was uneven and very annoying to walk on because it was a mixture of compressed and loose sand. Very strange for this type of forest we remarked. The paths are well worn by human, horse, and electric wheelchair alike. We even saw a kid riding a BMX bike though the forest which is not something I would like to experience. I'll take as many forward gears as possible please.

When we finally arrived at Pins and Needles (not to be confused with Pins & Needles near Old Finch) the GPS was bouncing everywhere. By walking back and forth a few times we determined that the cache was roughly 30 meters into the bush so in we went. Once inside the GPS signal situation got worse and I ended up walking in circles though dead foliage for quite some time. The clue went something like this:

Walk 30 meters from the path. (Gee thanks a lot)
Under a dead tree (double thanks)

After some more searching slimy logs Dad found the hidden cache, a peanut butter container. The contents were not very interesting and very wet so we signed the book and continued on our way.

Next up was Travel Bug Lodge about 1.5 km as the bird flew. As we walked we kept our eyes peeled for the abandoned railway line seen in the picture there. We found the graded ridge on the south side of the field and soon thereafter, the cache. The cache was a large bucket with a lid, probably the largest, and leaky cache I have ever seen. After this we went to the "end of the line" marked by the southern most point on our track there and recognized where a very old large bridge used to be. The walk back was easy because we walked along the right of way where the RR used to run.

The history of the place is better summed up in the log I wrote on the cache site.

October 10 by oldnumber7 (26 found)
Found this one very easily. The container is very wet inside with a small puddle on the bottom. The bag inside the cache has become grimy with moisture and mold will start forming soon.

If anybody is wondering about the abundance of sand on the path it is because this whole area was stripped of all tree cover for logging as late as the 1870's. Vast blow sand deserts were created in the process. Look around and you can find the remnants of the abandoned Lake Simcoe Junction Railway, which used to run right through the centrer of the parking lot to the path leading to this cache.

There is no track left after it was removed in 1928 but you can still see where the bridges used to lie as well as the raised graded rail path. Hint: One is on the south side of the parking lot where the path goes down the hill to the dried up stream bed.

Also, after visiting the cache walk a bit more south along the raised path (this is the old graded rail bed) toward the drop off where it enters private property. This used to be a huge rail bridge over a stream. You can see where the centre support of the bridge used to be very clearly.

The Mind Wanders

2005-01-29T14:38:00.000-08:00

It is amazing what I will do to procrastionate.

There is a major assignment due on Tuesday in Finance and I found myself reading The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers (Eastern Region). Now I don't know about you but I have never had more than a passing thought about our little colourful friends. What are they doing? Why are they here? What exactly are flowers? Are they here to enslave us all? I guess my mind had so rejected Mortgage Interest Rate calculations that it was desperately snatching at anything else it could find to occupy itself.

I suddenly snapped out of my trance, I was on page 250 or something looking at yellow flowers with 5 leaves. You see to recognize a flower you first look at the colour, then the leaf pattern. What? How did I know this? Its like in the Matrix when Neo suddenly realizes that he knows Kung Fu. Although in this case there was no bald headed black man testing my floral mastery in a cyber environment.

How had the book made its way downstairs, into my hand, opened itself and inputted its knowledge into my brain without me noticing? Sometimes these things can not be explained but I for one welcome our new Flower Guide Overlords!

Cyber Cache in the Woods

2004-12-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

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.