2012 Caching Heaven Geocaching Awards!

Hello everyone! Yes it is I! I do still exist! Any rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated! Honestly, I must apologize for the lack of posts over the last month. Work and family commitments have dominated the bulk of my time and I have not had any time to devote to writing a post. To make matters worse, January was my second month in which I found no caches. Since I have no Caching Three Stars again, I have decided to highlight some of my most favorite caches of the past year along with a few cachers that Caching Heaven has determined to stand out amongst the local Geocaching community. Without further delay, let’s get started.

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Best Traditional Cache

What a beautiful view! (click to enlarge)

Our best traditional cache of 2012 happens to be the winner of the first star for September, and was featured in our blog article entitled Milestone Marker 1500!. The cache is called View For The Gods (GC1YRJQ) and was placed by Ron 30207. Once you finally navigate the streets of Clarke’s Beach to find the entrance gate leading to the cache site, you will find that you are fairly close to the cache. Not so! Unless you plan on climbing some really dangerous terrain, your trek to ground zero will involve a 2.4km hike up a dirt road and through a windy trail. The long walk is well worth the trip. We were treated to a magnificent view of the Clarke’s Beach and surrounding area. It took us 40 minutes to make the trek in and 30 minutes to make the trek out. This cache provides a spectacular view accompanied by some great hiking. There was evidence of several types of berries along the way and the trek was very quiet. You could hear the birds chirping in all their splendor. If you go, make sure you bring a camera. I received a new camera for Christmas and wish I could make the trek in to get this one again.

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Best Event Cache

A great turnout for the event. (click to enlarge)

The vote for the best event cache of 2012, again, comes from our caching three stars for September. It was the second star and is special to us for the simple fact that it was an event hosted by our friends with a small bit of logistics assistance by us. The event was hosted by Diego and Dora and was a true geocaching event! The event was called Cabin Fever — Caching Meet and Greet — 2012 (GC3V1A6) and was held at Dora’s family cabin. For a detailed description of the event, please see our blog post devoted to the event called Cabin Fever: An Event To End The Summer!. The event struck the right balance of caching, food and fellowship. It started with a few hours of meet and greet, then a BBQ, followed by geocaching. There was even some more fellowship after some cachers finished finding the caches.This well organized event gets our nod as the top event cache of 2012!

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Best Geocacher

By far, the best geocacher of 2012 has to go to magicdog. The guy doesn’t know the meaning of taking a break. In 2012, he found 4774 geocaches and hid 100+ of his own caches. He currently sits at a whopping 7499 caches found since he started in 2010. He is often seen on the trails with his good friend, the Trailwalkers. He is also ready, willing and able to help other cachers in time of need, lending his time to accompany other cachers on finding caches he has already found. He has cached in multiple countries and has taken in many events over the last year. He seems to be an unstoppable force in the geocaching world and is rightly deserving of the award!

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Best Rookie

Our award for the best rookie geocacher goes to a pair of individuals that, most of the time, cache together. They go by the geocaching names Doctor Tee and RubyEmm. According to their profiles, they have currently racked up 347 and 213 caches respectively and attended 5 and 3 events respectively in 2012. Doctor Tee started geocaching in May of 2012 while RubyEmm started exactly one month later. I first started noticing them when, more often than not, they were beating us to some first to finds that were in my immediate neck of the woods. After doing that for a few months, I later realized that I knew these geocachers from outside the geocaching world. Imagine that! They seem to have caught the geocaching bug and I suspect that they will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

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And there you have it! The 2012 Annual Caching Heaven Geocaching Awards. We hope to make this an annual thing so please keep those hides coming for us to find. You never know, your cache might make it to our top. Also, if you see us out and about, introduce yourself. We might just feature your accomplishments in a future blog or next year’s awards.

Happy caching!

Frank (Jewel)

Caching Three Stars – September

As with previous months, September didn’t result in any stand-out caches until towards the end of the month. The latter half of the month resulted in a cache with a great view, a cache that isn’t always easy to get to, and a great event cache, all making it into our caching Three Stars. If you haven’t found them yet, I encourage you to do so.

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View For The Gods

What a beautiful view! (click to enlarge)

Our winner of the first star for September was just featured in our last blog article entitled Milestone Marker 1500!. The cache is called View For The Gods (GC1YRJQ) and was placed by Ron 30207. Originally, we had no plans to go get this cache. In fact, we never even knew it existed. We had been in North River helping our friends put off a geocaching event (check the second star). The event occurred on Saturday and we never got the chance to go caching. Therefore, we decided to do some caching on Sunday. My son, tinyseeker, and I went around to get all of the event caches first. Then, our friend Dora (Diego and Dora) joined us to get all of the caches in the Clarke’s Beach area. It was then, that we decided to attempt this one. When we finally navigated the streets of Clarke’s Beach to find the entrance gate leading to the cache site, our GPSr indicated that we were only 650 meters away from the cache. We didn’t immediately realize that we would have to walk 2.4 km to reach ground zero. The long walk was well worth the trip. We were treated to a magnificant view of the Clarke’s Beach and surrounding area. It took us 40 minutes to make the trek in and 30 minutes to make the trek out. It would have been great if we could have stayed a little while, but we had to get back for an awesome cooked Sunday dinner, prepared by Diego.

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Cabin Fever — Caching Meet and Greet — 2012

A great turnout for the event. (click to enlarge)

Our second star is special to us for the simple fact that it was an event hosted by our friends with a small bit of assistance by us. We realize that, since we assisted with this cache, we might be accused of showing favoritism to this event. We hope you all realize that our assistance was in a logistics manner. Most of the layout and details of the event were done by Diego and Dora, the event hosts. The event was called Cabin Fever — Caching Meet and Greet — 2012 (GC3V1A6) and was held at Dora’s family cabin. For a detailed description of the event, please see our blog post devoted to the event called Cabin Fever: An Event To End The Summer!. This event struck the right balance of caching, food and fellowship. The event involved a couple of hours of meet and greet followed by a BBQ. After everyone had the chance to socialize a bit, they were sent on their way to find 20 caches. A few even came back for a bit more fellowship. It was truly a well organized event.

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Water Challenge

This little land strip is not always here. (click to enlarge)

Water Challenge (GCG2ET) , a cache placed by Alastair Allan, turned out to be a very interesting cache and gets the nod as our third star for September. The cache, itself, is just a regular cache with a logbook and trinkets inside. Its hiding place wasn’t too difficult either. In fact, getting to the cache was fairly easy too. It was easy, however, only because we attempted it at the right time. As the picture shows, there is a thin strip of rocks leading to the cache area. We attempted the cache during low tide. The rocks are exposed then. At high tide, you would have to use rubber boots and wade across to the other side. We thought this cache was ingenious and we raise our proverbial hats to the cache owner for this interesting hide.

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Favorite Places – St. Mark’s School

This sign seemed out of place until you read the cache description. (click to enlarge)

We love caches that are placed to provide some kind of memorial to what an area used to contain. It is for this reason that we had to award Favorite Places – St. Mark’s School (GC3QHWJ) an honourable mention. The cache was placed by wademercer and got our attention when we seen a sign, that read “Teachers Only,” standing in the middle of a completely overgrown area. There wasn’t much evidence that anything used to be here but whatever was here had to involve teachers. After completely reading the cache description, we found out that there used to be a school here but it was closed years ago and then destroyed by fire. The area had become overgrown with trees and shrubs. Obviously, this area was the teacher’s parking lot and, with a little imagination, you could picture how things used to be.

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