A few weeks ago, Maddie me0w’s Brownies leader casually mentioned that the group was scheduled to finish out the guiding year with a geocaching expedition. I, apparently unable to keep my mouth shut when I ought to, squealed “Ooo, I’m into that!”
Next thing I knew, I was voluntold into not just tagging along, advising and assisting, but actually leading the whole 90 minute Brownies meeting.
In Brownies, the leaders are all called Owls. The lead leader of the 4th Bay to Bay Brownies is known as Brown Owl, and the others have names like Kitty Owl, Tawny Owl, and Star Owl. I guess, for a short time, I was dethme-0wl!
I was in Cubs as a boy, decades ago, so I had a foggy idea of what to do, but really no experience leading a large group of kids on an adventure. A few of the brownies also had cacher parents but for most, this was their first adventure in, as I had put it, “treasure hunting… with satellites!”
So predictably, it went…
… surprisingly well!
I picked out two easy (both difficulty and terrain) caches by scoutalot on the east side of Mount Douglas Park with which to introduce the girls to caching.
First, we visited GC1N62M “High 5 / Low 5”, which I had visited earlier in the day to stock with goodies for the brownies to trade. It was full, probably more so than it had ever been. It’s not a big container, about half a litre, but I made sure there were trade items for all 19 girls. Likewise, their leader brought a bag of plastic trinkets for the girls who hadn’t brought any trade items (which was all of them, including Maddie Me0w). Once we reached the site I explained to them that we were very close, and that we had been provided with a hint, and I told them what the hint was. With that, they had their first geocache uncovered in about 2 minutes. Wow!
The trading frenzy was, as you can imagine, chaotic. Although I gave them the two-bit lecture on trading fairly, I am pretty sure they took more than they left, but when the dust settled and the log was finally signed and put back in the container, it was still mostly full, with a mix of the items I had left, the items the girls traded, and a few items that had been in the cache before.
So with High 5 / Low 5 conquered and thoroughly traded out, we moved on to another cache nearby, also “5” themed (both were HAG5 hides), GC1N57J “5 Cedars in a Grove.” This is a somewhat smaller cache in a somewhat tighter space (for such a large crowd) and only a little bit of trading happened here. Maddie me0w and a couple of other brownies sniffed it out in about 30 seconds! The camouflage items attached to it provided a good opportunity to show another way that we use camo to keep muggles from finding them by accident.
But at this point we still had nearly an hour left and both the caches I planned were found! So the Owls and I quickly conferred and decided to hike back up the trail and back across the road to GC10Q50 “Mount Doug Misery,” a very challenging cache by well-known master-of-disguise 1dan. Surely, I thought, this would keep them occupied until the hour was up. I even took the opportunity, on the way, to explain what a DNF is and how that’s just part of the game.
We got to the Mount Doug Misery site, and I stood on a log and told the girls it was within 6 metres of where I stood (so please don’t go more than about 10 metres away from me!) The girls began their search frenzy, and I quietly checked my Facebook messages, thinking I had a few minutes. But I couldn’t have underestimated the sharp eyes of this group more, because they found something suspicious within a minute, and pulled the cache container out of its brilliant camouflage, confirming the find! Who’d have thunk a group of first-time cachers could make a QEF out of a 1dan cache! So impressed with this find was Brown Owl that she asked me to sign it with her own newly-minted caching name as well as for the Brownies!
By now, all the girls were satisfied with the trades they had done at the first two caches, so we took nothing and signed the log, but I think one girl (probably one who had earlier left one item and taken two or three) dropped a plastic trinket of some sort.
We carefully replaced the cache as and where found, and noted that we *still* had over half an hour left! So we hiked a few hundred metres south to a fourth cache, Mikey_C123‘s GCYDYM “Keep searching….It’s there”. This is a sort of a tribute cache, as 1dan’s cache hints all consist of “Keep looking, it’s there”. And it’s a difficulty 4, or at least was once, before the camo object disintegrated. But once again, the girls found it in no time, but this time they TNLNSL (took nothing, left nothing, signed log, for readers who may be new to caching parlance).
By now, we had just enough time to hike back to the Churchill Drive parking area, take some group pictures, and hand the girls back off to their parents. The girls dispersed, telling their folks wide-eyed stories about their first ever geocaching finds, and I am pretty sure several of the adult leaders created new accounts on geocaching.com that day!
After parting ways with the Brownies, Maddie me0w and I went for one more, the not-so-elusive GCJ0RD “SUMMER’S COMIN! CACHE” by the X-treme GPS Team (later adopted by Stellalabella). Maddie me0w, Lili me0w, and I had DNFd this one the previous weekend, but the log entries revealed that the old Team hint and description were no longer valid, with all the invasive ivy clearing that had been done recently. So armed with a much better description, Maddie and I returned and found it as quickly as the whole Brownie group had found the previous four caches.