Geocaching in the Rouge Valley

Other things to do with a Garmin Forerunner 201

Warning: The following post may bore some and cause rolling of the eyes

Okay, I got my Forerunner back from the repair shop after dropping it on my Kitchen floor a month ago. It had then been reduced to a $200 smelly paperweight. I am all happy again to have the technology back on my wrist and in my training program. (Chrono users: roll eyes here)

Today I decided to explore and hunt for some of the latest Geocache hides in the area that have been placed during my time without my Garmin working (I am calling that time : my return to the bronze age). The Geocache that I am going to detail is one that I think all us RiffRaff can relate to because it does a full tour of the Rouge Valley System. The name of the Cache is "Ten Little Indians". It is named after the Agatha Christie mystery. To begin with, I did a quick check of all the caches on Google Earth before I headed out the door. It was there that I saw that the 10th cache in this 10 stage multicache was all the way up at Steeles and Reesor, so I decided that I wouldn't be running up there just to get that one (an extra 6 km added to the run, yikes). So after picking that one up by car, I drove down to the Pearce house and parked the car.

• First Cache: I headed down the road hill towards the river side trail, in towards the Mansion was the first cache (a great network of trails in there, too bad they don't go anywhere).
• Second Cache was up at the bottom of the steps in the north section.
• Third Cache was at the very top of the hill beside the skating pond. I then followed the riverside trail, over the skids and over to the roller coaster. It was here that I saw the most amazing thing: A deer crossed the path in the field just before "Joanne's Cedars". The deer was maybe 25 feet ahead of me, it ran straight across the path and was then followed by 8 more deer!
• Fourth Cache was just past the top of our acheiver's hill, not far from where we always stop and re-swallow our stomachs.
• Fifth Cache was the pain in the butt. I had to follow the trail under the highway and past John's Maytag box. I then had to go up to East ave, down to Island Rd and about 100m into that section of the rouge. I am going to write the owner of the cache about that part since it really is disjointed from the other sections.
• Sixth Cache was back up and along the riverside trail, so that gave me a chance to become more familiar with that section (it really is pretty flat and quite icy today).
• Seventh Cache was about 200m directly behind the ski hill, down in the flats. Again this is a section that I have only been doing recently and it is great to get to know it better.
• Eighth Cache was up the dreaded hill on the trail heading towards Pearce house. I had to take the side trail that follows the top of the ridge and passes by that really beautiful lookout spot of the single lane bridge on Twyn Rivers.
• Ninth and final cache of the multi was across the field along the ridge trail that ends right at Meadowvale and the Zoo Bridge. Back to my car and home.
  
  Total time: 2:55:32.

I have to map it on to Mappoint to get the true distance. I had forgotten to hit start on the timer, put I wrote down the times that I got to each point.

So that is the report on my mental health day. I know that there are a tonne of things that I should be doing (namely finding employment), but the day was perfect and this made it better.

If you or someone you know might be interested in trying this out, let me know and I will fill you in on how to get started.

Up Next week: I am placing a cache in the ravine that we go thru on the Spruce Hill route.

To read my original post on Geocaching go to Spicing Up the trail runs.

(Don't worry, the eye strain suffered from Excess rolling should clear up in 4-6 days)