Today marks the first year of my Geocaching hobby – I think I must enjoy it !

30th May 2009
Today marks the first anniversary of my geocaching hobby. To mark this ‘birthday’ I decided I ought to go and find a 5/5 cache – one given 5stars for difficulty and 5stars for terrain, the hardest type of cache there is.

The nearest one of these to me is a puzzle cache called Burke&Hare GCMW56 and looking at the puzzle I hadn’t got a clue on how to solve it.
So I looked at the logs and found lots of clues, including a cacher who had put that he did the cache as part of a series of caches up on the moors… so looking at what caches he had done that day I could work out where he had been, so I knew what part of what moor he had been on… then another cacher had logged a photograph of her kid holding the cache with a good deal of background scenery visible… now you don’t go more than a few yards away from the cache site when you are taking photographs, so I knew what part of which moor the cache was to be found and what it looked like from within  a few feet of the cache hide…
Continue reading →

25th May 2010 – Janet and John go caching GC28ZV9 – cache #527
So, Sunday afternoon I had cleared all the five caches in Buck Wood, a whole swathe of the geocaching.com map turned from green sandwich boxes to smiley faces.
Then next day there’s a new green sandwich box appeared in the middle of it !
While I was finding the caches someone else was hiding a new one…. so next lunchtime I went back to the wood to find it.
I knew I wasn’t going to be the First to Find when I got close to the cache site and found that every log and stone had been turned over, so I turned them all over again until I found the log with the cache. Continue reading →

22nd May 2010 – Hangingstone GCX516 – cache #514
Saturday was a hot sunny day, very hot in fact, so I hid from it until the evening and then went out up Ilkley Moor to have a little walk round and get a few more caches.
The Hanging Stone is a large rock precariously balanced on a stack of other rocks, I must have gone on the road past this rock feature hundreds of times over the past 40 years, but I had never noticed it until 10 minutes before I found the cache, even though it is in full view of the road and less than 200 yards away !
The Cache hint said helpfully that it was hidden under a large sloping rock… lots of large rocks and as they are on a hillside they are all sloping ! Continue reading →

17th May 2010 – Archie’s Walk #5 – In the Wood GC1HHBM – cache #508
After succeeding to the 500 mark with several days to spare it was time for a new challenge, and getting to 1000 by my second anniversary seemed to be planning for a long time in the future, so I decided that I would start to clear all the caches near home, starting with all those under 5 miles away, then after that 6 miles, then 7 miles etc.

A list of the caches within 5 miles brought up about 40 caches, four of these were the last few of the Archies Walk series that I started about 6 weeks ago, so as it was a fine Monday evening I decided on a little stroll to clear these ones up. Continue reading →

15th May 2010 – EVERGREEN GC1DTPC – cache #491
A sunny Saturday afternoon, FA Cup Final or caching ? I chose caching.
There is a country park on the south edge of Bingley about 8 miles from where I live called the St Ives estate, which has at least 40 caches in or around it. So I decided to go and find a few of them to see what the place was like. The problem is that the road to it from Bingley is closed while they repair / replace a bridge over the river, so I had to approach it from Keighley.
Never having been there before I was a bit surprised to see that the estate is surrounded by a 10 foot stone wall, obviously the park had been the country estate of landed gentry who wanted to be separate from the great unwashed, so a wall was built. Continue reading →