A walkway from Boyes Beach, around the edge of Lake Okareka to the DOC campsite.
This cache is a bison tube that shouldn't be too hard to find.
Lake Ōkāreka has a circumference of 6 miles (9.7 km) and lies about 60 metres (200 ft) above Lake Tarawera. Its outlet flows underground for half a mile and forms the Waitangi waterfall. In fact, the Ōkāreka lake seems to be connected with Tarawera by underground channels.
Ōkāreka means "the lake of sweet food". It was first described in print by Sir George Grey, who visited it in the course of his travels through Rotorua to Taupo in 1849-1850. The route from Ohinemutu to Tarawera was a track which skirted the shore of Ōkāreka and reached the larger lake, near the mission station called Karari. Grey's journal reads:
"We reached the beautiful lake of Okareka, just at a place where there is a spring of deliciously cool water, wherewith we all refreshed ourselves and then proceeded to cross the lake in canoes. The lake is really an extremely pretty sight, the shores being lofty and wooded, with the exception of a valley at each end, where the roads run. A peninsula, on which stands the pa called Taumaihi, juts out into the centre of the lake. The waters are beautifully clear, and very deep. There is no apparent outlet to this lake. Its vent consists of an underground stream, which is hidden for about half a mile, and then makes its appearance, looking like a fountain, gushing through a heap of rocks and square stones of a basaltic formation, whence it makes its way in a small stream to Tarawera, the level of which is about sixty feet lower than that of Okareka, and into which the water falls down a declivity of twenty feet, forming a beautiful cascade, surrounded and overshadowed by a clump of karaka and other evergreen trees."
- Sir George Grey
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2022 is the Year of the Hide
We all know the game of geocaching cannot exist without geocaches. Some are older (almost historic) and beloved, but the game could not continue to flourish without new and refreshed cache hides. That is why Geocaching HQ invites you to celebrate 2022 as the Year of the Hide!
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