"Caching" In At Kettletown State Park, CT

The eighth annual Geo Jamboree was held under rainy skies this past weekend in Southbury, CT. The rain could not deter the crowd of nearly 250 geocache enthusiasts from hitting the trails. With more than 35 caches in the park, Kettletown State Park was an ideal location for the event. The Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics' latest reference hang tag provides minimum impact techniques to practice while geocaching. Click here if you are interested in purchasing a geocaching hang tag for your own personal use.

During the month of June, the first challenge of the Bigfoot Challenge is to bring and extra bag on your next outing and pick up any trash you find on the trail. Many of the folks we signed up for the Bigfoot Challenge reported that "Cache In, Trash Out" was their mantra and they didn't need to challenge themselves to do it, they were already practicing it! In the photo above, a kayaking geocacher takes the Bigfoot Challenge.

We were pleased to be a part of the Jamboree again this year and be able to share ways the geocaching community can practice Leave No Trace during all of their future outings.

Happy Adventuring...Kate and Tracy

Geocaching 101: Part Deux

This morning we said our goodbyes to our recent travel companion, Wolfgang Von Pitterpat. As promised in our earlier post Geocaching 101…We Need Your Help, we dropped Wolfgang off at the first suggested location, the Travel Bug Hotel (N 36° 30.306 W 104° 55.241) in Cimarron, New Mexico. Before dropping Wolfgang off we tagged him with our newest ethics reference card on geocaching*. This being our first adventure into the world of geocaching, we weren’t sure what to expect. Turns out we had a lot of fun and finally took the time to learn how to use the GPS unit that has been sitting in our glove box for over a year! Here is a brief retrospective of our geocaching adventure...enjoy!

We found Wolfgang at the top of Boundary Peak in Nevada and decided to make him an honorary Traveling Trainer!

Wolfgang perched on the Subaru on our way to Cimarron.

JD and Wolfgang figuring out how to use our GPS unit.

We found the "Travel Bug Hotel" right next to the historic St. James Hotel, which is supposedly haunted!

*No Travel Bugs were harmed in the tagging process.

Geocaching 101…We Need Your Help!

In honor of the new Leave No Trace ethics reference card on Geocaching, we decided to pick up a travel bug on a recent hike on Boundary Peak in Nevada. He’s pretty cute and we’re having a tough time deciding where to bid farewell to our new traveling companion, so we thought we’d ask for a little help.

Here is a list of places we are going to be visiting in the next few weeks, first person to leave a comment with coordinates of a cache in the general area of one of these events decides the fate of our little friend!
• Outdoor Adventure Summit – Philmont, NM
• Subaru Ready for Adventure Event – Malibu Creek State Park, CA
• Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics – Boulder, CO

Geo Jamboree 7

We spent a fun and soggy weekend at GC1K21P (that’s Kettletown State Park in Southbury, CT for all you geo-caching novices) for Geo Jamboree 7. With 44 caches, it was not surprising that almost 300 geo-caching enthusiasts took part in the 2-day event. In addition to hunting down caches (several of which required boats and rappel gear to reach) there was camping, live music and some pretty serious cuisine! We had a great time and want to give a special “THANK YOU” the CT A-Team (Walt, Ian, and Chris) for sharing their camp with us, for feeding us some amazing “camp food” and for keeping up company. Happy geo-hunting!