May 24/2010 |
Geocache Activity 658 |
FIND 600 |
IDENTIFICATION
Difficulty 2; Terrain 2; size small; Creator: Coolcat21 Date First Hidden: 9/19/2009 Date Last Found: 5/12/2010 Description You're looking for a painted, cylindrical container hidden about 10m off the lakeside trail that follows the pleasant Thunder Lake shoreline. Thunder Lake is located about 20 kms west of Barrhead, in the beautiful and well-maintained Thunder Lake Provincial Park. From the parking coordinates, about 500 m along the lakeside trail you'll come upon four benches overlooking a quaint little sand beach: a great place to do some leisurely wading along the shoreline (weather permitting of course). The cache is a little less than a 10 m bushwhack off of either of the two main trails that intersect nearby. The cache container is a spawn of The Garage (GC1BBDB) a giant container of a ready-made caches I found on a great hiking / caching trip to the Hinton area in the summer of 2009. Thanks very much to madmother for the cache container!
Hint Look low near a clean cut. Comments
PLANNING
We planned to visit a cemetery in the Barrhead area as part of some genealogical research. I made a route that would also include visits to 3 provincial parks where I identified a geocache that we could search for. This is part of my goal to eventually find caches in 60 provincial parks. I downloaded the cache coordinates for the 3 sites and was ready to go.
OUTCOME
I had some initial difficulty with this search. I simply paid attention to the last five letters of the cache and spent about 20 minutes searching for the cache near the parking lot. This didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time and it also didn't match the cache coordinates that I had written down on a pad of paper. I finally gave up and was about to select the next cache on my list when I noticed that my GPS had two items GC1YXKT and TR1YXKT. I had selected the second item without realizing that there were two items with the same last 5 letters. I had never seen a cache with TR as the first two letters, but I shrugged and selected the GC1YXKT item. I was then able to drive to within 50 meters of the cache by going into a camping area.
Here is my posting to the geocaching.com website:
Lovely park. Nice hide. All is well. Took TB "HOME TO DUVALL". SL. Here are a few photos:
container is under right log
three of the four benches and container
swag
Thunder Lake from the benchesI am 1/1 for today. This was the 6th provincial park where I have found at least one cache.
While creating this web page I noticed that the geocaching.com web page for this site contained a waypoint for the trailhead and this waypoint had the label TR1YXKT. I now understand why I was having difficulty at the outset. I had never previously encountered a situation where the GPS downloaded both the final cache location as well as a waypoint. I will certainly be aware of this in the future. I continue to learn.
