Why I archived GCQXR7
I placed GCQXR7, also known as GAG7 – Cedarview Park ‘n’ Cache, in early-October 2005 for the seventh Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa. The original cache container was a small Altoids tin with a rare earth magnet that I had painted with a cracked metallic grey paint. It was stuck on the underside of the flange at the base of a lamp pole in a park-and-ride parking lot near an interchange on the 416.
It blended in very well, but everything became damp in just a few days, so clearly the container wasn’t waterproof. I replaced it with a small Lock & Lock container with a rare earth magnet on the bottom. I placed this one in a more sheltered location — inside the base of the lamp post.
At the time, it seemed like the perfect location — sheltered and relatively easy to reach. I didn’t give much thought to the bundle of wires running up one side of the inside of the pole. The container was placed in such a way that it was far enough away from the wires. Naturally, I assumed people would put it back where they retrieved it from. As anyone who has placed a cache knows, geocache containers often have this tendency to wander around where they were placed. On a couple of occasions, I found my container tucked up higher into the pole, sometimes behind the wires running inside it. Yikes!
Another problem with the location was that it was possible to fumble the container when retrieving it or replacing it with the end result being that it ended up at the bottom of the hollow concrete base about 1m below the surface. This happened twice. The first time, another geocacher retrieved it and tied it off so it couldn’t fall again. The second time, model12 retrieved it again, and put a more foolproof tie-down in place. A tip o’ the hat to him for doing this (twice). 🙂
Overall, it was logged as found 124 times, which is quite respectable. Thank you to everyone who sought it out. People seemed to like the cache, but as geoSquid pointed out in comments on my blog entry about lamp post caches, many LPCs are inherently dangerous because of the wires running inside virtually every lamp post and this was one of them. I didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed because they were electrocuted because something caused the insulation on the wires to crack or they came loose.
That’s why I archived GCQXR7.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
That picture is cool. I wouldn’t have thought there was space to stick a camera. Cell phone?
I think this was the first lamp cache I’d ever seen.
Yup, I took that with the camera in my Nokia 5300 on a recon visit to see if it could be recovered after someone dropped it down into the base of the pole. I used Photoshop to being up the contrast because the original picture was quite flat and I couldn’t see the cache container on the screen of the phone when I took it. You can see the bundle of wires in the bottom right corner of the screen where they come out of the PVC conduit.
That picture brings to mind another risk that I hadn’t thought of before, that’s not so much an issue in Canada (although it could be) as it might be in other places.
There’s lots of space down there for some critter to live… a critter that might be venomous, or at least unpleasant enough to not appreciate hairless monkeys sticking their paws in its lair – similar to my semi-famous “raccoon” incident.
Was just looking up what LPC meant and found your blog. Thanks for the info. I am a newbie but have already encountered a few LPC. Also have found that some cachers have removed plates on other electical type items that are not part of the cache! Scary, scary!
Thanks again, geogrinch
I’m glad you found it helpful! 🙂
I’ve come across enough examples of bad LPCs that I won’t actively search for one and I have walked away from others that have turned out to be LPCs. There’s almost always somewhere more creative nearby to hide a cache, but people seem to ignore them.