Geolocation Gaming Bonanza Day

A bonanza day for LANMonkey and geolocation games for certain! Today Piggy the Geohound (A.K.A. Jasper) took me to Delta Watershed Park to find a couple of Geocaching.com geocaches we hadn't found there yet.

After a quick 400+ metres through the interconnecting trails, we managed the finds for both those caches, and were off to a great start to our caching day.


Next up was to switch listing sites as OpenCaching.US has one of only three listed caches in the Lower Mainland in this very same park. So after WetCoaster's virtual we went, which we could be FTF on. After a minor struggle with coordinates our knowledge of the park and common sense took over and we headed straight for where GZ simply must be!


Arriving at ground zero we filled up with nice, fresh cold water and then searched a bit to find the information. At this point I learned a couple of interesting things about OpenCaching.

•  First, I thought that C:Geo on my Blackberry would allow me to use OpenCaching.US as an alternate listing site but it's not an option - only OpenCaching.DE and OpenCaching.PL; I tried to connect to .DE on the chance that it's all the same data with simply different URLs, but I couldn't authenticate my OpenCaching.US account so I'm assuming that's a no. I'd be curious to hear from OpenCaching.US user or moderators if I'm off on the wrong tangent here?

• Second, when completing a virtual on the OpenCaching listing service, you use the "keyword or phrase" that the C/O has you looking for at ground zero as the "password" you need to submit the log. So really, no need to submit an email to the C/O before logging your find. Fascinating. In fact, much more like the newer Geocaching Adventures Lab Caches from Geocaching.com as opposed to how the grandfathered virtual caches at GC.com work.

 With our first OpenCaching.US find ever under our belt, and a FTF on it to boot, we decided to check and see if there were any Munzees in the park - yup, two and neither far from where we were. "Well Piggy, let's get ourselves some Munzees."
We honestly don't play Munzee much so it was a great opportunity to get a couple of those found. So while we tracked down the Munzee locations, we took the opportunity to use Sighter and place four new sights in the park for the others in the Lower Mainland who've started playing that fun game.

Soon enough we had located those sneaky QR codes and had the first captures on those Munzees - Wow, FTFs in two different geolocation games on one day... sweet!

Time to head back to the car and head home. But wait! Just as we got to the car the phone buzzed a Geocaching.com alert for a newly published traditional cache in Crescent Beach. Well... it's not *that* far and Piggy and I do have the day off... why not? So in we hopped, loaded the coords in the GPSr and off to Crescent Beach.

When we arrived, we started searching and only moments later hear familiar voices on the other side of the hedge - it was Adroit Seeker and Rain Willowsnap, local cachers I'd crossed paths with earlier this morning. LOL. The three of us searched for a bit when Adroit Seeker came up with the find for a shared FTF. Nice!

After a brief but pleasant chat at ground zero, we all headed off, and Piggy and I headed home to go fire up that BBQ and cook some steak.

"3 FTFs in three different games, and four new sights uploaded. Piggy, do you feel like you earned some steak tonight?"

Frostier - An Epic FTF at 2408 metres

A couple of weeks ago we were camping in E.C. Manning Park and had a ton of excitement, so much so we wanted to make sure we shared it with you all. No, no bear encounters (this time) but not only did we get FTF on an entire geo-art series (The Twisted Chocolate Bar Series - GC574V2) but we managed a 22 km return hike to the summit of Frosty Mountain (2408 m elevation) and found a cache placed very nearly a year before that had yet to be found.

A big goal for the camping trip was to make the hike up to Frosty and try for the FTF on that cache, as we'd had our eyes on it for a while, but with a late melt this year we really weren't sure when we'd be able to get there. We hit the Frosty Loop Trail at 07:10.

There was certainly no shortage of snow, and we started hitting larger and larger patches of it as we were only about half-way to the summit from the trailhead. I was beginning to get a little dubious about what the conditions would be like for the final push to the summit, recalling that it is a very open summit - this photo here is the actual summit where the cache is.

But Mrs. LANMonkey was ever optimistic and onwards and upwards we trekked through the forests. At points we had some amazing aerial views of Lightning and Flash Lakes. Eventually we hit the wilderness campsite at the head of one of the tributaries into Frosty Creek. The camp was FULL of young hikers hanging out under a tarp as it was lightly drizzling by this point.

"Uh oh" we thought, "did they already go find the cache?"

We passed through the camp and kept heading up. By the time we reached the Larch Meadows the ground was completely covered by about 1 - 2 m of snow. It was warm out and the snow was soft in lots of spots so hiking was tough work! Next we searched for "Frosty Mountain Larches" (GCQXNX) and made a quick find of that cache.

The view was spectacular here as we were nearly standing at the top of a rainbow! Next it was the scramble up the last rocky parts to the summit itself, and the path was surprisingly clear of snow which was great since had it been covered in snow this would've been impassable without crampons and an ice-pick.

Right near the summit we found a little pocket of hardy alpine flowers - a neat little "surprise garden." Finally we had reached the summit, and then began our search for the cache...

...it wasn't too long at all before Mrs. LANMonkey had the cache in hand, and we suspensfully opened it to check the logbook for any other signatures.

And at 11:04 on 6/28/2014 we found "Frostier" (GC3M7D3) which had been placed 7/15/2013 and unfound until our climb & search! What an exciting adventure, and we've captured it all for you (including Mrs. LANMonkey's version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow") in episode 56 of LANMonkey's Geocaching Adventure.

If you'd like to follow our adventures regularly, eat lots of bran, then follow us on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter (@LANMonkeyGC).

And remember to always cache safely, and cache often!

The LANMonkeys.