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Over the last two weeks we have been able to experience our first Earthcahes. Our first one was on a trip to Prince Edward Island (PEI) and our second (last night) was a bit north of our home.

So what is an Earthcache?

An EarthCache is a special place that people can visit to learn about a unique geoscience feature or aspect of our Earth. EarthCaches include a set of educational notes and the details about where to find the location (latitude and longitude). Visitors to EarthCaches can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage the resources and how scientists gather evidence to learn about the Earth. (from Geocaching.com)
(more at www.earthcache.org)

Our first earthcache taught us about the red dirt found on PEI - there is a high concentration of iron oxide in the soil which rusts and turns the sand and soil red - very cool! Our second one brought us to this amazing sand dune close to our house - well about an hour away - it was very close to my Aunt’s house though. This dune was on the bank of a river near Wasaga Beach in Ontario. It was an amazing site to see. The amuzing part of this cache is that my Aunt - who lives about 4 minutes from the wonder - had no idea this was there!

So what is so great about Earthcaches?

Well there is no cache box to find - no log to sign - they can’t hold trackables - there is no trading going on - so what’s the point?!?!

Well Earthcaches are designed to bring you to some amazing part of the earth and help you learn. This is one of the reasons we go geocaching - we love to see really cool places - earthcaches definately help you find these places.

So if you have never tried an earthcache go ahead and look for one close to you and check it out - you will learn something and you may just have fun doing it!

ok - So it has been a really busy but great summer. I have not been updating the blog here for some time but I hope to get back to it! Here are some geo-highlights from the summer…

• We had our first “muggle” experience - that’s right - someone snagged on of our caches. We were able to replace the container with a slightly smaller one and moved it a couple of feet away.
• We had to archive one of our caches as the tree it was hidden in was chopped down - right to the ground - gonzo! We were able to retrieve the cache as it was just tossed down the bank of a hill. We are still trying to decide what to do there.
• We took our annual trip up to the family cottage and made a trek out to a fabulous cache very near our cottage. We attempted this cache last year but got messed up with some technology issues Everything went fine this year though! I will try to post some pictures here later as it was a beautiful spot on a quiet lake - awesome!
• My wife surprised me with a trip to Prince Edward Island (PEI) - Canada’s smallest province. We went there right after the cottage and enjoyed some great time away from the kids. We were able to do a good number of caches on the island which brought us to some amazing places and some amazing views!

Well I hope to get into some more details about our adventures - but for now that’s the update!

Milestones are great! —they give you both something to work towards and something to celebrate. We have been Geocaching for about ten months now — we haven’t gone too nuts with wanting to get a large number of caches done — we did however want to get to 200 caches before the end of the year.

For some people 200 is not that much and for others it seems crazy — for us I think it was a good goal!

Last Saturday (April 26, 2008) we successfully accomplished our 200th cache! The cache (Scanlon Creek Passport Office — GCV51K) was a great Letterbox Hybrid placed by The Mighty Canadian Juicepig in 2006. We chose this cache because it looked like a great adventure (and it wasn’t an LPC ;)). We had recently done another great cache by Juicepig (GC1AMC5) and was ready for a great adventure.

To complete this cache we had to find 6 points through out the conservation area were there were hole punch plaques — once we found these we could punch a hole in the paper and compare the pattern with the decipher code printed on the cache page. The patterns lined up with numbers. Once we found all six punch plaques we were able to determine the coordinates for the starting point of this Letterbox.

Once we got to the starting point we followed clues to get to the final cache location. We had a little trouble at first but were able to figure it out. Once at the location we found the cache pretty easily.

It was great to push towards the goal of having 200 caches by the end of our first year — and it was even greater to celebrate this milestone together as a family!

Hey maybe we should call this in to the Podcacher show? « yah… a shameless plug with great hopes of publicity

Yesterday my wife Sandra and I went out to do a couple of geocaches. It is the middle of the winter here and we have had record snow falls. This makes caching interesting in a couple of ways:

1. Caches get buried -  we had someone report a DNF on one of our caches yesterday just because of the massive snow - luckily they found two others hidden by us and still had a good day out.

2. Snow makes for good geotrails - We did a cache yesterday that was hidden by the person who introduced us to caching. I knew the area pretty good and drove right up to it. From the car I could see a trail leading to a potential cache location. Leaving the GPSr in the car we walked the trail and found the cache - the geotrail kinda took the fun out of this one

There are many things that could make a Geocache memorable to me. It might be a very creative or interesting location. It could be a difficult find that challenges your finding skills. Sometimes it is the level of stealth required in order to make the find and not look too out of place. In a recent cache it was the container that made it memorable - in fact - out right funny! I can’t divulge the actual part that made us laugh out loud - you will have to go find it yourself. I can tell you however that we will remember this cache adventure for some time. Thanks for a great laugh DRMOO!

DRMOO is a couples team that are very active cachers in our area. They have hidden some great caches that are most often very creative. When we met - Mrs. DRMOO confided with me that it was her with the ideas and Mr. DRMOO (an enginer by trade) who helps bring them to life. If you are ever in the Barrie Ontario area be sure to check out some of their great hides!

This is our first winter doing Geocaching. There are some obvious differences for us who live in the great white north (also known as Canada) - there is snow. With snow come snow tracks - footprints that sometimes can lead directly to the cache. This can be an advantage for the finder or possibly boring - the snow hints sometimes make it just too easy.

I have seen it a lot in the logs of our caches recently:

GC17K55: Nice little winter geo-trail to follow! - So grateful for large footprints in the snow!

GC17Q5J: It looks like somebody shoveled a path to the cache…

GC16Z1T: Must have been there a few min after Avanar, I followed the tracks in the snow.

While snow-caching can be easier in some ways - hiding a cache that is winter friendly might pose a few challenge. I posted a question in some local Geocaching forums to get some good hints on hiding winter-friendly caches. This is what I learned:

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Our first time out Geocaching was a little interesting - we were not sure exactly what we were looking for and we only had our GPS for a day or so. I had read the GPS (Magellan Explorist 200) instructions and was feeling pretty comfortable with my new toy - but my whole family was counting on me to make it work.

We set out for our first find - The Settlement of Adult Kirk.

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