As a teen-ager I got into the sport of Orienteering. It suited my sporting personality – an individual sport with a great group of people. It was in the bush, relying on your map reading skills and your ability to bash through salal (the bane of every west coast off-path hiker). I competed for four years, and had a blast.
The modern-day version of orienteering is geocaching. It’s not as intense, as you aren’t really reading a map on your own (i.e. the GPS unit tells you where to go) but there is still the sense of adventure and a hunt.
This week-end we did our first geocache hunt. We stuck to a fairly well-known trail for the first one, so that in looking at the map I knew where we were supposed to be. It was a multi-site cache, meaning we had to find the first item which would then give us the coordinates to the second item.
We almost gave up on the first item — we were in the right spot but it took us almost an hour to find the hidden item! However we did find it, and we successfully found the second item as well. We logged our first cache, and Bush Boy traded a trinket in the cache box.
According to the geocaching website, there are over 800 caches in this area. Some are urban caches, but many of them are along the trails and rivers that we like to explore. As we are out every week-end with the dog anyhow, this seems like a great addition to our adventures. A walk with a twist, I’m calling it. Can’t wait until next week-end. Although I find myself longing for the control point orange flags of Orienteering ….
Rocks, Waves, Beach 
I’ve heard of geocaching before but never really looked into it…sounds pretty cool. Although with GPS, it doesn’t seem quite as intense as orienteering!
Salal. Oh Salal. How I love thee. And so grateful that is not an east side plant!
By: Rachel on April 20, 2009
at 3:46 pm
That’s a cool idea. I didn’t know there were that many caches around here.
By: Shannon B on April 20, 2009
at 9:39 pm