I had finished early at a Workshop at the Fire Service Training College and needed to find a cache for the August Geocaching Challenge.
Looking at my map, there were plenty to be found in the “Badlands”. The “Badlands” is a term given colloquially to the area north of Grand Junction Road and is one of our busiest areas in the Fire Service.
I gave my mate Garry a ring to see if he was up for a walk along the Little Para River behind the Old Spot Hotel. I had heard that there were some very good caches up in that area. What I didn’t tell him was that the terrain on one of the yet to be found caches was “4”. The highest terrain rating is a “5”.
But a “First to Find” is a “First to Find” especially out north where they don’t normally last longer than about 30 minutes. I guess the terrain scared off the local cachers. 🙂
We parked the cars and counted the tyres and headed off up the river. The going was easy to start and the caches were just as good. In fact the work put into the cache containers was exceptional.
The bar has certainly been lifted with these caches. They have been engineered by a new cacher called clojo1 who is also a boiler maker.
The caches included:
GC4FTT2 – Ophidiophobia – a snake;
GC4G7G5 – Arachnophobia – a red back spider;
GC4FWY1 – Chelonaphobia – a turtle;
and GC4K56W – Apipobia – a bee.
The terrain for the 1st three caches was 1.5 and 2 but the fourth cache was the terrain “4” cache. It wasn’t raining today but by the time we got to this one, the heart was pumping and the shirt was saturated with sweat. Lucky I have been hitting the treadmill lately. 🙂
After removing the impressive bee from its honeycomb home, time to check the log book and yes it was blank – yay a”first to find”. 😀
A easy walk back down the river to the cars and a check to see if all the wheels were still there and time to head south home. Today’s walk was 3.5 km but it certainly wasn’t a flat 3.5 km.
