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! 🙂