Winter Caching
Ma and I have been members of the Moncton Outdoor Enthusiasts Club since it began about 30 years ago. Winter never slowed down our activities as we cross-country skied and snowshoed all winter and even did some winter camping. So when we began geocaching in 2004, we included it in our winter activities.
In January 2004, we skied in Kouchibouguac Park to our first two cache finds in New Brunswick and then in March we snowshoed 5 hours and 14 kms to get a cache in the Park. We have been winter caching ever since. We have great memories of snowshoeing adventures to find and hide caches on Shediac and Cocagne islands and finding caches on the Dobson trail. We walked snowmobile trails in and around Moncton to get cache series placed by Jim52. We snowshoed 11kms from Shediac to Malakoff placing a long series in the wilderness.
But how is winter caching these days? In the Moncton area the caching has been wonderful. There haave been winter series by many cachers including Tiger Tracker who has a couple of series on trails in the Dieppe area. Most caches in the area are winter friendly, hanging at a good height in trees. Hillbilly Bob’s 150+ Dobson trail caches are all winter friendly.
The last couple of years we have made winter caching trips to Fredericton. The winter caching there is incredible. We have snowshoed many trails there picking up cache series and there are still lots of trails waiting for us again this year. We highly recommend winter caching in Fredericton.
We have been caching in the Saint John area a number of times and enjoyed the caching there. However, we had not winter cached there till this year. We made two trips to that area in the last week and while we enjoyed the caching, we were a little disappointed by our number of DNF’s. Many caches are at ground level or in rock formations and cannot be easily accessed when there is snow.
On the subject of winter caches, we own caches on the ski trails at the Beaver Ski club in the Grande-Digue area. Cachers have enjoyed discovering the trails and getting the caches, but we will likely be archiving the remaining caches there in March because they are not really accessible in summer. So if you have not found one of the caches there, this may be your last chance.
Here is a link to one of the caches. http://coord.info/GCMFAE
Here is a picture from the cache page of two squirrels and 4 TB’s.
In September, we placed a series of 8 caches on a trail near Adairs Wilderness Lodge. If you havent gone for them yet, you may be able to go for them in a couple of weeks. Here is an item from the Outdoor Enthusiasts Schedule for an event led by Paul Gaudet who writes the hiking articles in the Moncton Newspaper.
January 23, Sunday – Snowshoe from Adair’s Lodge to Walton Lake & return. Moderate, 8km. Meet at C.O.C. at 9:00 am or Adair’s at 10:30 am. Contact Paul Gaudet at 877-0911.
Here is a geocaching map of the area.
http://www.geocaching.com/map/default.aspx?lat=45.6047&lng=-65.322283
The new Statistics page at GC.com shows which days of the year that we have not found any caches. We are now working on filling in the days that we have not done.
We started by going caching on Christmas Day and have done a few since then but we have already run into trouble. We had to fill in January 13, so we stared out the window all day Thursday wondering if we should venture out during the storm. We decided to stay home. Actually we were pleased to see the snow as it will improve the cross country ski trails here in Grande Digue and also allow us to do some snow shoeing.
January 15 was another open day so we decided to go for some of Jim’s new puzzles. MA solved a few that had come out the day before and we had 10 to get. So we put our snowshoes in the truck and headed out. We startedthe day with the Buffet at the Casino ($5.99 for All-you-can-eat)to build our energy. We bumped into Jim’s wife Arlene at breakfast (Jim was still asleep at home).
After breakast we headed out to the caches. The caches are all on walking trails but the city has not had time to clean the trails, so we had to snow shoe. The caches seemed to be in two distinct groups. Pa figured we could drive over to each group and do them separately. MA insisted that we could snowshoe to all of them from our first parking spot. Of course she won the argument. So we snowshoed for 2.5 hours Saturday morning to all 10 caches. It was tough going in spots, especially when we had to get off trail to get the caaches. But it was a beautiful sunny day and we thouroughly enjoyed the caching.
Winter caching is great. A big thank you to Jim for his new 52 cache puzzle series.
Saw this winter item on ACGA.
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Just got off the phone with a friend living in Calgary.
He said that since early this morning the snow has been nearly waist high and is still falling.
The temperature is dropping way below zero and the north wind is increasing to near gale force.
His wife has done nothing but look through the kitchen window and just stared.
He says that if it gets much worse, he may have to let her in.
LMAO. Does anyone have a puzzle cache for those who have cached
every day? Looks like a lot of cachers are challenging themselves in new ways with the release of the supper awesome new stuff/stats. Might as well have a cache as a reward for the monumental effort… Hint Hint!