I went out to Ferris Provincial Park over the weekend and took the dog along for a great hike. Ferris is our local Park near Campbellford, and has some nice trails. Another one I enjoy a lot is Seymour Conservation Area, just south of town, where the trails are well marked and offers a choice of routes.
Since I discovered geocaching, whenever we plan a hike, we’ll get onto Geocaching.com and download the cache locations around the area, and Campbellford and its surrounding area doesn’t disappoint. There were several in both Seymour and Ferris so we aimed to find at least two, and although one was hidden really well, we were successful with both.
Finding the general area of a cache is pretty simple with even the most basic of GPS units. My Etrex Legend is easy to use and will bring us within about 7 metres of a cache. After that, it gets a bit erratic so it’s just a matter of getting onto the wavelength of the person who hid it, and figuring out where the best hiding place would be. A few weeks ago we were looking for a cache in an area of woodland with a lot of fallen trees. Many were hollow logs and I just knew the cache would be in one of them. After about 15 minutes searching, I found a log with a rock leaning against one end and lo and behold, when I moved the rock, there was a plastic box with the familiar Ontario Geocaching logo on it.
Geocaching is such a great way of enjoying the outdoors and taking a break at a cottage at the same time. There are lots of cottages available to rent at this time of year, and some even offer special Geocaching Packages that will get you started on this great hobby.
I came across the Geocachers Creed too, and it makes good reading for anyone thinking about heading out looking for hidden treasure!
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