Weather permitting, we’ve been busy geocaching the past couple of weeks, as we have a push on to rack up lots of finds before mosquito season hits. We made it to 1500 on April 30th, by "finding" the brass cap at the top of the Calgary Tower. You can read our log here. GC43F3 is quite a unique virtual geocache, with almost 400 different "findable" locations, each one unique survey marker. There’s a similar cache, also owned by outforthehunt, in England, called Ye Ole Survey Monuments.
This has been one of our favourite caches since we discovered it in July / August of 2006. So far we’ve found almost 70 "brass caps." The hunts can sometimes be difficult, as the survey monument may be "below grade", so you can end up working a grid with your magnetic compass, trying to pick up magnetic anomolies that tell you where to dig. And sometimes they’re easy, as the marker is above grade or underneath a miniature manhole cover. It was especially gratifying that to make the Calgary Tower brass cap our 1500th find, as it was our first brass cap DNF, back on August 8, 2006.
outforthehunt has selected brass caps all over Alberta for inclusion in his "findable" list. At the moment, we have about 40 more to find within a 100 km radius of our home coordinates, and we look forward to every one of them.