My name is Tamarackgurl and I'm a Geocacher
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10 years of my membership with Geocaching.com! Lets celebrate with a cache of course!
Summer 2017 will see construction in the area. It is suggested that you search for the cache very early in the morning or late in the evening when the construction workers are not there. This cache is too small for TB's. I'm using this cache as a place to drop my dead TB's.
If you are attempting this cache in winter, no shovel is needed, but you might get a little snow in your boots getting to GZ. Please replace the cache exactly as found! I can not stress this enough. Moving the cache by even 1 inch will compromise its location and it will get muggled. You should not be able to spot the cache when standing 2 big steps away.
10 years ago, in 2002 I was bored and procrastinating studying for an exam. I loved the outdoors and enjoyed high tech things. I searched for something new to do. Not on Google.ca but on search.com back when everything started with your own typing of http:// www. search.com was a useful web site, and anything less than 66% of your original search was nothing but porno and nudy pics. Definitely not kid friendly.
Up popped Geocaching. Sounded interesting. I read up on the topic at length, while mom thought I was studying for the upcoming exam. ha ha ha. But I pursued this new sport with great interest. Back then, internet was dial up, and pay by the hour for time connected. We had an internet plan where we were only allowed 15 hours of internet per month via the landline dial up modem that sounded like someone yielding some small creature by its tail and whipping it around (I don't recommend that). Not like the lightning internet speed, and wifi we have today. Our household desktop computer had 32kb of RAM, and about 500mb (0.5Gb) of ROM (hard drive). We certainly have advanced in leaps and bounds.
While being a college student, both time and money for a GPS were things I did not have. GPS units cost a minimum of $300, and up. This is when expensive gas in Ontario was $0.75/L, but sometimes $0.60 could still be found. Unlike today where gas in Ontario is $1.20 and higher.
I signed up with Geocaching.com to gain access to most of the website, and start to look for nearby caches. Back then the only way to search for a cache was to type in your address and up would pop a bunch of caches with 1.1km North from your home address. Not the amazing map we have today. To find where the cache was without a GPS, required a lot of time and patience. You would have to take the cache GPS reading, then go to another website (sponsored by JEEP), and have the reading converted. Then take the converted co-ords to mapquest and see where on the world map it would put you. If anything was wrong then in Southern Ontario you'd have to go scuba diving in one of the great lakes for an underwater cache, I'd say yeah right! and start the process all over. This whole process would take at least 5 minutes per cache with the speed of the computer and internet combined. Would you still geocache if there were no advances and things remained the same as this? Remember computers didn't start coming with USB ports until very late 2002 and 2003. So manual entry of co-ords into GPS's was mandatory.
After searching slowly, in short sittings at the computer, for about a week as time allowed. I finally found that in the neighbourhood that I was living in, there was only one cache nearby. A river was a short distance away, I thought there would be plenty in the bush and trails along the river. 10 years ago there were none in the bush. Today that same neighbourhood has about 100 caches. I planted a geocache in the bush, but without a GPS, it meant using someone else's co-ordinates for a parking area, with encrypted essay that detailed the walking paths to get to the cache. My cache was a 4L ice cream pail, with no camo tape, in a stump of a log, with a random piece of wood overtop. Nothing too elaborate.
I found my first cache, that one and only one in the nearby park that I knew quite well, with only a compass, and a mapquest print out (no satellite view back then). I headed off with a smile on my face, and a hope that I might actually find the thing I was looking for. It was a valentines themed multi cache, that had only overhead projector film tags tied to trees/bushes. I managed to find the first 4 steps in the multi cache and called it a day. That was early April 2002. As the time commitment was extensive, and the GPS tooo expensive, without a GPS the sport just plainly was not fun. I gave up Geocaching, and continued on with life. About 6 years later in 2008, I got my first car navigation GPS, and in 2010, I was re-introduced to geocaching by a friend, GuiderMeredith. Today March 30, 2012, 10 years plus 1 day after signing up I found my 100th Geocache.
So if you're still reading my ramblings, please join me in celebrating 10 years of caching, while I plant my third geocache. Enjoy!
FTF; GuiderMeredith (her first FTF)
STF; Licwid 9 minutes after publishing
TTF; gr8pix
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Vf guvf n fnavgnel anab?