Silver Star ~ FTF!

Went skiing at Silver Star today, and after seeing the new multi cache listed, couldn't resist going for the First-to-Find.

Since I wrote a lot for the log, and I'm tired I thought I'd just paste my log instead of rewriting it all again.

FTF
WOOT!!!

Today was the last day skiing with the school and, by chance, I checked Geocaching thinking that if there were any new caches since last I checked, I wouldn't want to miss them. 
Good thing I did. This was definitely a more enjoyable way to spend a day, skiing around, on easy trails, answering questions, before finally heading to the final. 

Upon getting my ski's I immediately went off for the first stage, the paw prints. Headed off, counted, and then down to the chair lift. Then I realized I had forgotten to grab my lift ticket from my teacher. Ooops. Thankfully I managed to make it up that time without getting checked. 

Once I had the lift ticket, I headed down to the comet again, off to do stage 2. While not necessary and not having a cellphone, I just took a picture of myself there. (Hopefully I'll remember to post it later)

Then off for the long ski to Stage 3. Just to realize I can't seem to reach it from the top of the comet. Headed down under the Attridge chair, and then up it. By the way, the Attridge chair has got to be the sketchiest and slowest chair around (aside from the green)
On top, I soon found the pole I was looking for, hiked up to it and got the number. 

Then I had to race back to make it to my lesson in time. Thankfully I did make it. 
After the lesson ended, I was stuck going all the way up the comet, across the top, down under Attridge, across the road and up Silver Queen, before I made it to Stage 4. There I did some quick counting. During which the Lift Attendant came out and asked what I was doing. I told him and he said I must be part of some scavenger hunt going on the day. :p

Now down to the Silver Woods side to grab the next info, up to the top, and writing down the number. Made it to the backside after some time involving cross country, uphill and restricted area. Saw the large structure, then raced back to the main building to report in for lunch and figure out final destination. 

Plugged in the co-ords and was racing all the way around back again. Came around the area of stage 7 and thought something must be wrong, as there was nowhere there to hide anything. Checking my GPS i realized I had only changed the waypoint name, but not the co-ords, so plugged in proper co-ords and was off. 

Had a little bit of time wandering around with skis, in the deep snow before finding the string. Pulled it up and YESSS!!!

Got my FTF. Lots of travelbugs and items in here. Took the FTF prize, thanks, and a bunch of trackables to move along. 

Overall good multi. Fun way to spend a day during the ski season, easy for beginner ski/boarders also. 
Thanks for the Cache!

Glad to finally have the chance to cache again. Winter is far to cold and miserable for very much fun caching opportunities.

A Quick Trip to Kelowna

Went on a very quick trip to Kelowna for a Doctors appointment today.

While this was a very quick trip, and I only got 4 geocaches, i thought it was worth the blog post for the one picture.

When I first was reading the previous found logs on this one, someone said,

Nice hide, we have lots of them in The Netherlands.

I automatically knew it had to be a birdhouse. So that's the one I went to next.
Had to wade across a creek to get to it, but it was worth it. My Guess was correct.

I always love seeing these birdhouses because everyone is so unique and different.

This one actually had a bird nesting in the top! 

  Then i went to another interesting cache. A Decoy and Regular container. In the same Container!
Thankfully i got the real cache first. That one could really confuse you if you got decoy first and didn't clue in.

A Geocaching Holiday - Day 4 & 5

Day 4:
My final day of Geocaching in the Chilliwack area.
After spending most of the morning before church trying to solve a puzzle cache, I was glad to be able to do that one first thing after church ended. Then biked back to house to go with my Uncle for the rest of the Give R Take series.

After parking the truck at the end, we went to the beginning, (with their 2nd vehicle) and were dropped off there.
Almost immediately after being dropped off I was doing two things.
Enjoying the abundant blackberries, and searching for the first cache, which was really close.
Found the next three relatively quickly also.
Then we were on the actual trail. This side was quite different from the other. Yes it was still steep, but it was much more entertaining, because it was a mountain bike trail. Made me wish all over again that i had a nice mountain bike.

This Guy Didn't wipe out. The following Did.

As it got further we went into more of the technical stuff, like bridges, jumps, ramps and such.

The First of Many to Come

Another Bridge

A Really High One

A Long One

In case you're getting bored of the jumps, enjoy a Christmas Tree!

Yes there's a Cache right behind it! 

And back to the jumps...

Another Long One! 

A Cache and Trackable I Dropped

A Big Jump

Anyway, sorry for those who may be getting bored of the bike trail pics. That ended then, and we were back on a different FSR road. Hiked along that until turning off onto a dirtbike trail.

Onto a Different Trail

From there we followed a bunch of different dirt-bike trails getting a cache every 700m or so.
All in all we got 15 caches along this trail. Came out near the truck and got to see these neat stone statues.

Interesting Statue. There was 2 of these

After that my Mom picked me up not long later. And we headed to Maple Ridge, where we were staying at friends.

Day 5:
 Day 5 started with me having to have a doctors appointment at 3pm in Vancouver. However, that still meant I had 4 hours to go and get some caches before we had to leave. Off on their bike which they lent me.
Managed to grab 9 caches in Maple Ridge and saw this very unique tree

The tree on the right grew sideways and joined up with the left tree. Completely joined, this is just 1 tree! 

Also managed to snag a letterbox, private property cache, and a few small caches in Vancouver.

Then it was time to finally head home.  Well, that is after a quick stop in Vernon. (and 1 more cache!)

And so my Geocaching Holiday came to an end. But i did get 100+ caches and lots of biking!
Was it worth it? Totally!

A Geocaching Holiday - Day 3

Saturday brought on my third day of Geocaching
Sardis two and I, drove out to Langley, first thing, to see the Geo-Race 2 start.

If there is one thing I so want to do next year, or anytime, it's that event.
Unfortunately I never ended up registering in time so, I couldn't participate aside from seeing off the starters and waiting at the finish.
However from what i did hear, it sounds like it would have been awesome.
Pretty much you start off racing to the ammo can, which has a bunch of envelopes, with the first puzzle's info in it.  

The First Race to get info

Once your team has solved that puzzle, you go to the coordinates it gives you. Once there you have to do some activity or other before getting the next coordinates

These activities range from, rock climbing, downing 1L of slushie, Racing down Cultus Waterslides, Corn mazes, puzzles, swimming, driving like crazy, eating hot buffalo wings, golf, the zoo and other such creative fun ideas.

Team Gearhedd, at Slushies

Tubes

Working Through a Corn Maze

Solving Puzzles or Various Types

Colour By Number for Coordinates

Going to the Zoo

Rock Climbing

Throughout the race there are also caches placed, as FTF temptations. You can possibly get a FTF getting them, but you'll loose time. And the hole race is based of time. Whoever was the quickest overall. Each station records how long you took to complete it. 

The race finally ended out at Harrison Lake. More on that later though.

Anyway, after seeing off the groups at the beginning, we went and talked to geo_canuck77, who gave us the coordinates of the end location. However since it was expected that they wouldn't get there for a good 4 - 5 hours, we had some time in Langley to cache.

Our first stop was to a Traditional Micro Cache, but we never did find it. 

The next stop was to another tree climber cache. I like these ones, and might duplicate one or two. The coast also has some really great climbing trees for them to be in though. 

Me Up in Langley Tree Climber #1

After that one we walked out to look for a multi but got another DNF. :(

We also snagged a bolt cache, some small lock'n'locks and another one of those spare key caches. Got that one 2nd guess.

Then we headed back for lunch. 

After lunch we headed out to Harrison Lake, where the Geo-Race was ending. 

Once there i got another 3 caches while the teams slowly came in. 

The first one i did, was also my first 5/5 Cache. 

You had to swim out to it. Then dive underwater about 5-6ft, to unhook the cache, and bring it back up.

So while i can swim just fine. I can't hold my breath whatsoever. So getting this one was going to be a little challenging. At least i thought so. 

Saved myself alot of time and trouble however, by just swimming out there with a log (dead tree, not logbook). Once out there i managed to pull up the cache, which was attached to a 20-30lb weight to keep it down,. by using the log to keep me afloat. Even then I nearly couldn't get the thing up. 

Once it was out however, I had to swim back to shore to open and sign the logbook. 

That's Me out by the Buoy

After replacing it, i couldn't feel my toes for the next 10 minutes. That lake is freezing cold!! Like 5x colder than Shuswap Lake has ever been.

Then i got two other nearby caches...

A Quick Photo

Once I had done those caches, I headed back to wait for the teams to come in. Setting up there was WorldCaching also. Perfect opportunity to meet the new owners, and see what they had to sell.
All sorts of sweet stuff it turned out. Ended up buying 2 new caches, which i plan on releasing by October, some geocoins, and A Trackable Patch. Since i don't have a vehicle for people to track, i thought the patch was perfect. (Now it's on my backpack, if you see me ask me for the code) It has a unique icon and everything!

No, that's not my code...

After that we left. Was really pleased with it though. That was my 500th find, I attended the event, got a 5/5 cache, and a bunch of geo-goodies without having to pay shipping.

Once we got back to the house, we had a quick supper. Than it was back on the road, for me at least.
Took their bike out to go and cache North Chilliwack area. Got a couple interesting finds while out there on that run.

A Rather Unique Container

Another one of the caches was one of those private property ones, where it's right on the cacher's property.
Got to meet family extremes on that one. A few more finds and DNF's and that's it for the day.

All in all a great day. Tree Climbing, Road Trips, Biking, Geo-goodies, 5/5 cache, 500th find and so on

A Geocaching Holiday - Day 2

My Second day starts and the first thing on the list to do is a hike around Hicks Lake.
So we take about a 45 minute drive up past Harrison Lake and over to Hicks Lake.

This little trail is quite nice, just a round the lake thing.
We started off and it went pretty well. Only 1 DNF the entire time.
Once we got half way round, the trail got alot better (in my opinion).

Now we get cool bridges...

Also got to use sardis two's GPS, which is a lot nicer than mine. Has all the cache info right on the GPS.

An interesting find along that trail was a cache called Thogards Secret Burnination Cache.

This one was a traditional on the site, but it had the makings of a letterbox. 

You had to draw a dragon.

And then we quickly grabbed a few nearby ones before heading home.

So after having lunch, i was off to go and bike the one side of the trail that circles Cultus Lake. 

There is a series of caches along this route called, Give R Take, with a total of 26 once you do the whole around the lake trail. 

For this part i did the last 13 of them.

Most of them looked like this.

No problem. The only problem is that this side of the trail goes like straight up and then straight down and then staright up and then straight down and then... well you get the idea.

These people had obviously never heard of switchbacks. Or just staying at the same elevation. 

Despite all the hills, this trail was a fun bike. There were also a few short side trips you could make for nearby caches too:

Teapot Hill

Taking a quick break

Buttermilk Cache

The Bejeweled Cache was a quick jog into a seriously mossy spot! 

--->

And finally the letterbox at the end

Now that I finished the trail, I'm off to cache in Cultus until nightfall, when we'll do another Night Cache.

So I managed to do a few more finds before dark, although i also had about 4 DNF's in here too. 

Of course I couldn't resist doing a cache with this nearby!

And so here's the found cache

This Nightcache was way simpler than the other one, although it was no less fun.

Love the ending!

Feel Watched?!?

It was rather creepy. All the trees had eyes

All in all a great day. Set a new GeoFrenzy record, of 38 caches in one day! W00T!
Now to get some sleep before tomorrow's caching

A Geocaching Holiday - Day 1

Well it looks like my long Geoslump is over.

For most of this year since the March event I've been pretty slack. Doing caches here and there, but otherwise not much.

That changed this past weekend.

It all started about 3 weeks ago when my Uncle and Aunt came for a visit. They are also geocachers, sardis two,  and they offered a place for me to stay if i came down. 

Well of course i said yes. The time for me to go down however didn't come until the last week of August however.

Then just after family got back from Telkwa, the next morning, August 26th I took the Greyhound down to Chilliwack, where I was to be picked up.

Upon arriving at their place, barely 10 minutes from arriving sardis two got a new cache notification. And off we went. After searching around at GZ for a few moments, we spotted a possible spot. Nope. It was a decoy cache.

About another minute later sardis two made the find. Since I won't be naming the cache, (Though it isn't to hard to find out) You can see the picture below.

So I've barely gotten there and I've already got a co-FTF. Not bad for the first half hour.

After lunch, I'm off on their bike to go and find some of the nearby caches before supper.

If there's one thing i can proudly say here. Despite the huge number of cachers, almost all the caches are of really good quality. No light skirts. No film canisters. Almost all in great shape. 

That afternoons bike ride brought me another 13 caches to add to my 1 i had already gotten.

Here's a cartoon me. The cache was in the ivy. 

This one above, had the little wire tucked into the trees grove. Took a little bit of searching

This was the only film canister found during my trip. It was sitting in a hole in the side of a tree

After heading back for supper, i actually got another chance to go out again after supper, and get picked up to do a Night cache come dark. So off i went. Managed to sneak in another 9 finds before dark. 

These ones were a pain to get to as there is construction all over this area and it gets quite windy.

However the blackberries are quite good, and ripe. 

Found a blackberry tunnel in one spot along the route to a cache. 

The iPod touch Geocaching App, is so nice for paperless Geocaching. Used to have to print off a binder...

Spare Key Cache: Chilliwack

That's a really neat idea, and i'm planning on putting on out like it by winter.

And of course there has to be a chinese puzzle box. 

Now that it's night though it's off to do the Night Cache. We start by following the reflector trail into the park down some trail. You're supposed to count the number of reflectors at each point and use that for the co-ords for the final.

Came across this old tree fort along the way. The black beneath it is water.

Of course we missed them the first time round. Geocanuck77, the owner, had the reflectors everywhere from the looking spots. Across the small creek. Way up trees. Took the second trip in to find them.

Even then we didn't get them all. It was just pure luck, that on the way back, we glimpsed some relfectors. 

Since we were still going through counting, we decided to check it out.

To find that we were at the final! The Cache itself is in a box hung way up in a tree with a pulley. 

Then you had to open a cypher. Thankfully we'd gotten all but two correct, so we were close enough to guestimate the other two.

All in all a very fun one and my 450th!