Caching in northern New Brunswick

As most of you know myself, Paul of Paulandstacey and Ron568 went on a caching trip last weekend to northern NB. We left Moncton at 5am on Saturday and drove straight to the oldest cache in NB, Beginner’s luck? First Geocache in New Brunswick! GC760. We got there around 9am and started caching our way back to Beresford where we were staying for the 2 nights. This is, like most places in NB a very scenic area, lots of shades of green on the northern end of the  Appalachian mountains broken up by beautiful river valleys. One thing we noticed was the distance between caches in the area which is so different from southern NB where there are far more cachers. It is a hiders dream up there, so many great places for caches but it is also nice to drive down a road and not have to stop every 200m to get out. We also found the 3rd oldest cache and oldest multi in NB, Puff The Magic Dragon’s Home hidden by Shawn and Holly. Unfortunately  it is currently missing one of the stages so we used a life-line to Holly and got some help, thankfully the BlackBerry had reception in that area. Unlike like most multis today it took about an hour and over 20 kms of driving to get but it was fun. In return we replaced a missing container to one of Shawn and Holly’s other caches. We took a quick run into Quebec to get one cache since we we so close.  We ended up finding a lot of caches from handful of cachers as there are not very many in the area. A lot of them don’t really do much caching anymore like Unkown45, Escondedores, paradox63, hyper1s, colombo&crew and casperkb who passed away and many were from some newer cachers like Greybeast, who has many new caches hidden in the area.

We put a lot of miles in on dirt roads finding Unknown45 and Greybeast caches, the dirt roads up north are in much better condition than they are down south, very dry and hard packed, easy going. Surprisingly many of Unknown45 caches which were hidden back in 2007 for the Winter hiding Challenge were in great shape considering they were mostly yogurt or margarine containers and still hanging! I guess you don’t need to do much maintenance on caches that only get found a few times a year.

Now this new guy, Greybeast has put out a lot of new caches in some great areas. He is really trying to put out quality caches that will last and putting them in good places, although when a cache is down a dirt road, 20 km’s from the nearest house they don’t need to be 100 meters in the bush 😉 We decided that since we were only there for a couple of days and wanted to find a bunch we were not going to do anything over a 100m bushwack unless it was something different or special, another small or 35mm in the woods was not worth the bother on this trip. Greybeast had some good containers, varying from small magnetic to fake branches and hidden on various things from bridges to stumps. on day 2, after finding so many of his caches I sent him an email asking if he was interested in meeting the 3 guys who were both thanking and cursing him all day. He replied within an hour and we were going to meet him at his house around 9pm for some beverages. He lives right besides a beautiful waterfall on Mill stream in Robertville, what a spot.

One of the caches we found was also the only cache that I really think I could get into trouble finding, it was Vertigo!
GCJFDH by Insp Gadget. This cache, rated 4/4.5 was the most fun cache I have found yet even though I knew that I shouldn’t be there the whole time we were there…lol

Another thing we noticed was the ratings on some of these caches, most were rated way to low, 1 or 1.5 rated caches should be park and grabs or just a few meters of a sidewalk or trail not 50 meter bushwacks over downfalls though alders and shoulder height raspberry bushes. Many caches were unnecessarily far in off the road 10 to 15 meters is just as good as 75 to 100 meters unless there  is a reason to be that far in. If you are putting out a series of 20 or more cache along the same back road, it is there for one reason, numbers so why make it hard? If you want to put out a series of 3-4 rated caches, great put them in hard to get to places but rate them that way.

Speaking of hard to reach places, we found all 3 of the Mountain Trilogy caches by Escondedores. The only one to find the final is Jim52, unknown45 and shortfuse tried but DNFed it. We found it and got back out in 2.5 hours. The first, for us, was a park and grab but the next 2 were not. After finding the first we projected to the second cache and headed in 550 meters away, we spent about 20 minutes searching in a very dense hillside before I sat down and reread the listing. While reading I noticed that the projection was done in degrees true not magnetic which all 3 of us had used, so we changed our setup to true and discovered it was about 50 meters further uphill. Paul found part 2 in about 5 minutes, it was beat up but thankfully still readable. We did some minor repairs and took off for part 3.  This one was 440 meters away, uphill through more dense bush and hundreds of downed trees. At times were climbing up steep 10 meter high rocky mini-cliffs. When  we got to ground zero we found the rock we thought was the one but it wasn’t. After about 5 minutes of searching Paul yelled out that he found the rock and 10 seconds later that he could see the cache! Wow, we were so excited, what an adventure and just as we got there my phone buzzed telling me there was service so I Tweeted and Facebooked from the final! Then we took some photos like we had just climbed mount Everest or something. A few minutes after finding it and taking pictures we realized that we had to walk out, 850 meters direct to the car. I must say that it is to date my most satisfying find and hope that this find will encourage others to seek it out. If you do decide to do it I would recommend contacting one of us 3 for some tips, it would suck to go all the way there to miss it, we were so worried that one of the stages was missing. The cache owner does not appear to cache anymore but they logged in to geocaching recently, maybe because of our find on this old forgotten cache.

We found some 1/1 rated caches, a 3/3, a 4/4.5 and a 5/5 on this trip, had a great time, met a new cacher and got tired and dirty. What more can you ask for.