Reflections on my first year caching

One year and 1300 caches later, I guess I might refer to myself as a cacher, maybe not as experienced as some, but a cacher nonetheless.

Reflecting back, caching has become a large part of my life and it has come to mean many things to me.  It’s about the cache itself, like successfully completing the Critter series or finding all of Garn430’s challenges.  It’s about the exercise, like walking 10 miles, up and down mountain trails, in Phoenix.  It’s about getting to know your city better – visiting areas of Moncton that you would never have had the occasion to go to.  It’s about getting yourself into predicaments that you would never have dreamed possible had there not been a cache hidden at the top of that very steep hill or at the bottom of the ravine – the one where you  had to slide down on your  rear-end to get to it safely.

It’s about having a reason to get outside, even while drenched with mosquito repellent, just for the sake of being outside. It’s about taking your brother out so that he might begin to understand what has impassioned his big sister and having him be the one to suggest that we “just do one more” before calling it quits for the day.  It’s about the exhilaration – dancing on Hillsborough Road with Tigertracker Too after successfully navigating down the wrong side of the lake, circumnavigating  rocky outcrops, making the find, and climbing a perilously steep embankment without hand or foot holds to get back up to the road.  It’s about proving to your friends who think you are a girly-girl that you can turn rocks over with the best of them, while hoping the rattlesnakes and poisonous spiders really are asleep.

It’s about finding or placing trackables and then watching their travels round the world, and exchanging emails with cachers in far-away places like Australia when you happen to find one of their trackables sitting in a cache in Moncton!  It’s about simply stopping to listen to the quietness of the forest, enjoying the solitude or spending a few moments fascinated by the brook babbling its way over the rocks.  It’s about the endurance – hiking seventeen kilometres of the Dobson Trail through bogs, and mud, and raining snow, and living to tell the tale.  It’s about running screaming away from the garter snakes that you almost stepped on or not seeing the black bears and bull moose that have been spotted in the area.

It’s about the numbers, trying to reach 1000 caches within the year and spending three days walking the Confederation Trail on PEI to help make it happen.  It’s about taking part in challenges sponsored by Cache Up NB, and almost falling into the raging creek while crossing an icy, wooden bridge when trying to determine how many quarts of water you can fill in one minute so that you can lay claim to an earth cache – and then having to find two more earth caches so that you can complete the task.  It’s about seeing this amazing province in which we live through a different set of eyes.  It’s about getting to know other provinces, states, and countries through the eyes of the locals who draw you to their favourite spots, always in search of that elusive cache.

It’s about boring non-cachers to death with stories of your exploits but then having one of them ask to go out with you sometime to “see what it’s all about”.  It’s about having your one and only, adult, son admit, after having grudgingly accompanied you to find a couple of caches while on the way to Christmas dinner,  that he “kinda gets it”; and then he tells you about the adrenalin rush he felt when he was the one to make the find.  Even better, he even agrees that maybe, when he visits next summer, he just might go out with you.  Sometimes, it can even be about becoming a verb, especially flattering when it was Cableguy’s son, NBGamer22, who first coined the expression! Or having a cache named after you by your very best friend, the one who introduced you to caching in the first place, on the occasion of your 1000^th find!

But most of all, it’s about community; feeling that you “belong” in this town to which you moved seven years ago, because you have met a group of people equally as impassioned as you are about geo-caching; people with whom you swap stories at events, or bump into on the Confederation Trail and hook up for a day of caching; people who give you a lesson on how to use your Iphone, or take you out to do a Wherigo that they had already done, just because you asked whether it was worthwhile to update your GPS so that you can download wherigoes; people who hide caches on their property so they can watch the hunt, and then have a good laugh together; people with whom you share the experience of hiking the Dobson Trail and who all feel the same sense of accomplishment; people from all walks of life, and from across the generations, who all come together to form this wonderful, zany, community.  It’s been quite a year.