gordon.dewis.ca

I went geocaching yesterday afternoon for the first time in a couple of months and I hit a neat milestone with the last cache I found. GAG9 – One for the birds (GCYJ1E) by model12 & Aldy marked the 450th geocache I’ve found. It also marked the 350th geocache I’ve found in the province of Ontario.

The geocaching gods were taunting me as I homed in on it, because when I was just a few metres away from the cache my GPS receiver suddenly indicated the cache was 160m away, +/- 186m and continued to jump around. I thought that perhaps I’d lost a clear view of the sky, but the satellite screen seemed to indicate it had locked on to 6 or 8 satellites with strong signals. When I moved a bit farther away, the GPSr settled down and I found the cache quickly.

It was nice getting out caching again.  Life has been so busy, or the weather has been so sucky, that I just haven’t had time to seek any geocaches. However, things are less busy (I think) and the weather is more conducive to being outside that I’ll probably start caching a little more regularly.

It seems that some geocachers still haven’t figured out that wrapping a piece of PVC pipe in duct tape and hiding it in a public place isn’t a good idea. Fox affiliate WLUK-TV reported on Sunday that a “suspicious device” found in a tree in a park in Allouez, Wisconsin Sunday morning was reported to the police. As a result, the bomb squad was called out and the container was blown up.

One of the firemen who also responded happened to be a geocacher and he was “99% sure that it was a geocache“. He went on to say that though he was pretty sure it was a geocache he wasn’t “going to gamble on it with the one percent”.

The response from the geocaching community has been mixed. Most seem to agree that an unlabelled container, particularly one that looks like a pipe bomb, is a prime candidate to be blown up by the bomb squad. Some people are encouraging the owner of the exploded cache to replace it. One cacher decided to blame the people living in the neighbourhood with this gem of a log entry:

I realize nobody will ever see this note, but I need to vent. To the residents of Irwin and Kalb Streets: This cache had been here for almost two years – in fact, there was another cache in this park before this one. Why did you choose March 15, 2009 to report suspicious behavior at this cache site after so long? Was Wise River Rambler [the last geocacher to find it before the bomb squad --G] really any more suspicious than me or any other finder on this cache? This cache has been found at all various times on weekends, evenings, and other various times that you’re home and watching across the street at the park. Why not yesterday, or the day before, or when tkks was actually placing the cache? You had plenty of opportunity to call the police and tell them that there were GeoCachers there. Seriously folks. . .

It doesn’t matter how long the cache was there or how many people found it. It was placed without permission, was not labelled and looked suspicious. The onus is on the hider to ensure that a geocache is placed in an appropriate location. If geocachers continue to ignore this we’re going to start seeing more laws banning geocaching altogether.

At least the fireman got to log a find with the following log entry:

Hey, I guess I can log this as a find. It should now be a multi because it’s in a million pieces. Ya’ll wouldn’t believe the time, energy & money involved to find it.

I headed out with my friends Patti and Yves for a couple of hours of snowshoeing and geocaching Sunday afternoon. After loading up our GPSs, we met up at P11 in Stoney Swap off Hunt Club near Moodie and set off to find the first of four traditional geocaches, GAG11 – Pale Rider (GC15VVF).

Pale Rider turned out to be a medium-sized garbage pail that had been painted, which we found quite easily. We signed the logbook and I left one of my pathtags and off we went to find the next cache, Thomas Ahearn #4 (GC139P1).

On our way in to Thomas Ahearn #4, we passed by the distinctive imprint of a large bird that had swooped down and snatched something for dinner.

This was the first omen of things to come.

Thomas Ahearn #4 is one of a series of geocaches dedicated to the memory of Thomas Ahearn, an inventor and business man who was born in Lebreton Flats in 1855. Set on the edge of the hydro right-of-way, we were “greeted” by several dogs from an adjacent farm who were not impressed with our presence. But they kept their distance and we moved on to the next cache as quickly as possible.

Yves came across a large tuft of deer fur snagged on a bush as we made our way to Toybuilders Parts (GCZN3Z).

This was the second omen of things to come.

Thirty metres along, we came across what the omens had been warning us of: the body. Fortunately, it wasn’t a human body (geocachers have found those on a couple of occasions). It was the remains of a deer that had been beset upon by wolves, coyotes or perhaps the dogs we saw earlier. The scene could have been taken from an episode of CSI, with blood trails, hair and so on. Kind of grusome, so of course we took pictures.

After looking at the “crime scene” for a while and speculating what exactly had savaged the deer, we continued on to GCZN3Z.

Toybuilders Parts (GCZN3Z) was surrounded by a flock of chickadees, so we stopped to feed them bits of a granola bar and take pictures of them before grabbing the cache container and signing the log.

En route to the next cache, GAG11 – You Dang Dirty Pole CaTche (GC10DP2), we stopped to chat with a couple of cross-country skiers. One of them had heard of geocaching and both were interested to learn there were geocaches in the woods.

GC10DP2 ended up being a micro hidden in the woods. Not normally the type of geocache I’d search for, particularly in the winter, it ended up not being as evil as it could be. (Micro caches are typically the size of a 35mm film canister or smaller (this one was about half the size of a AA battery), so looking for one in the middle of a forest can be a daunting task.) The container was very cleverly hidden, so I won’t mention exactly where it was so as not to spoil the search for other people.

All in all, a good way to spend an afternoon!

I was finally able to do some geocaching here in Quebec City.  Since arriving, I’ve scoped out some caches, but wasn’t able to actually find any of them because there were too many people around.  I remedied that by doing some late night geocaching.  One I found was near the fountain in front of the Quebec legislature building (GC154TJ).  Naturally, the geocoin I’ve been carrying around for a while was too big to fit in the container.

The other one I logged was a virtual geocache.  There’s a tree in the Old City that has grown around a cannon ball and to log the cache you have to take your picture with it. (GCHKWJ)

This bumper sticker was stuck to a number of things in the Old City, so I thought I’d take a picture of it for Trashy.

Pictures of it and some other pictures I took since the last update are in my gallery.

I posted my latest entry about the perils of using an ammo can as a geocache container just last night.  This morning, one of my news alerts sent me a story from Midland, Texas.

According to the story, three young people carried a package out to the mesquite grove next to a University of Texas building at 4 p.m. and then left the area.  Someone reported this to the police who investigated.  The Midland Police Department robot, Andros, X-rayed the package that said “10 blasting caps” on the side and found several toys inside. Investigators from the sherriff’s office said they’re going to be taking fingerprints from the container and looking for the people involved.

How many more incidents is it going to take before people learn?

If you are wandering through the woods and come across a metal box painted army green with a handle on top and bright yellow letters stencilled on it with the words "cartridge", "26.5mm", "10 round clips" and so on and maybe even an orange warning sticker with the universal explosive pictogram on it, what would you do?

(more…)

Thursday’s Metro Ottawa included a story that opened with the following:

A suspicious package attached to a pole forced the closure of Riverside Drive and a section of Ottawa’s bus Transitway for several hours yesterday.

That description made me think "I wonder if it was a geocache", so I popped over to the OttawaGeocaching.com forums to see if anyone had posted about it and sure enough, it looks like Dead End Cache (GC1DT9M), now archived, was destroyed by the bomb disposal robot.  At least it was "not deemed hazardous".

Pictures of the geocache from some of the logs show that it was a flat metal container with a green "official geocache" sticker on it.  In other words, another opaque geocache container on a bridge reported to the police as "suspicious".

While the hiding spot probably wasn’t the best choice (on a bridge over the Transitway), this incident probably could have been avoided if the container had been transparent.  Chances are that the person who reported it to the police wouldn’t have been concerned about it if it was a Lock ‘n’ Lock full of trinkets they could see into, and even if they did report it to the police, the police would very quickly have been able to determine there was nothing dangerous in it without having to open it.  Instead, the police ended up closing a section of the Transitway, and parts of Riverside and the overpass it was on for several hours, and paramedics, firefighters, the bomb squad and the Hazardous Materials Unit were tied up while it was being investigated.

So, let’s start using more transparent containers.  And, let’s stop placing geocaches in locations where people looking for it could be mistaken as doing something nefarious.