Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Geocaching Adventures: Duff

 It is always good times to cache with old friends...

... especially if it involves a trudge through the snow.

I've known him (caching name: Tha Duh Feez) since before either of us got into caching, way back in 2006.  He attended my wedding, and I was a groomsman in his.  I moved away before I started caching, and ne has recently gotten into it.  So I made an extra effort to ensure that we got a chance to cache together while I am in the Great White North for the holidays.

Yesterday was the day.

We started the day by going to the Ontario Science Center in Toronto and checking out the Groundspeak GPS/Geocaching exhibit: GPS Adventures.  This exhibit is a GPS maze that teaches people all about geocaching.  To get through the maze you need to solve 4 geocaching style puzzles.  It was a surprisingly good exhibit, and I even learned some things (a surprise, since I have been caching so long).  It is well worth checking out if the exhibit comes to a city near you (check www.gpsmaze.com for details).

The GPS Adventures exhibit is also a geocaching event, so once we signed the logbook we had our first cache of the day in the bag.  However its not exactly geocaching as it was meant to be, and I still needed to get my boots into some deep snow, so we still had some more adventure ahead of us.

So in search of this adventure we headed northwest to Halton county, and headed out on a quest for  a cache along the Bruce trail.

The weather was 22f, with a soft falling snow.  About 3-5 inches on the ground.  The trails were very rugged, with lots of puddles and ponds (mostly frozen over). Aka perfect Canadian weather.

There were a lot of rocks and fallen trees to climb over, which the snow made that much more treacherous to navigate.

But navigate we did, and after about 40 minutes on the trails we had the cache in hand.  20 more minutes and we were back in the car warming up.

All in all it was a fantastic day of caching with an old friend, and the snow hike did a lot to satisfy my cravings for communing with the Canadian winter.

I'll leave you with some more images from our hike: