A couple of days ago a number of geocachers who own caches that are in Gatineau Park received the following message:

You are receiving this message because one of your caches is located within the territory of Gatineau Park.

The National Capital Commission (NCC) wishes to control Geocaching in the Gatineau Park.  Therefore, it is currently setting a procedure for caches within its territory, and is asking geocachers to archive all caches in the park.  They are requesting the cooperation of concerned geocachers to pick up all the containers.

We are asking for your cooperation in collecting your cache and in archiving the listing. Note that on June 20, 2010, all remaining caches within the territory of the park will be archived.

All new requests for publication at this location will be denied until permission of the NCC and the new procedure are received. We apologize for this inconvenience, which is beyond our control, and solicit the patience and cooperation of all geocachers.

Thank you

The Quebec Reviewers

About 300 geocaches are affected by this mass archiving. Needless to say, the local geocaching community is not impressed.

(more…)

John Goatcher, a local geocacher, sent me a map that overlays geocaches in and around Gatineau Park on top of the map found on page 39 of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan (GPECP). As he commented in my earlier post on geocaching and the GPECP, it’s surprising that more geocaches aren’t in the “integral conservation zone” (the dark olive area in the maps), given that it covers roughly half of the total area of Gatineau Park. As you’ll recall from my previous post, geocaches in the ICZ “will be relocated in areas that are less sensitive before the end of summer 2010”.

(more…)

The National Capital Commission has released some additional information about the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan on their website. Specifically, they have released a Fact Sheet, the Priority Initiatives and a document about the species at risk. The full 120+ page report has yet to be made available in electronic form, but I think that you can view it at the NCC Library.

In the Priority Initiatives document are the various activities that will be affected by the GPECP. Besides basically saying ice climbing is pretty much banned from the Eardley Escarpment because it may interfere with deer in the winter (even though other parts of the plan suggest that there are too many deer in the park and the law being used as the justification is a provincial law and not a federal law), it also mentions geocaching.

(more…)

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.