History Caches

Since it's colder here than a... well, it's cold OK?

We won't be doing any geocaching today.


A few posts back, misterteacher left a comment that got me thinking about using geocaching for education. One of our favorite caches was the Watertown History Cache. Very educational, and a brilliant puzzle to put together. So I thought I'd do a little thinking about educational caches, and here's what I came up with.

A great idea is to have the class create a cache, like this one, where student keys travel the world. This creates opportunities for studies of Science, Geography, & History. Another idea is to have someone create caches for the class to discover. The caches could be temporary, just for that event, or permanent, for anyone to find.

We found a bunch of caches at The Bjornson Educational Center, (brutal caching, read about it here) where mamakat has hidden over a dozen caches. She is an educator in nearby Menomonie, Wisconsin. She takes her class to Bjornson to study history, science, & nature. Geocaching is part of it.

Here's some ideas for history caches.
"History Of Corona" Totem Pole Cache This one is a micro at the base of an historic totem pole.

20th Century History 1960 This one is a multiple, puzzle cache based on news stories of the 20th Century. It's too bad that coterm59 didn't add links to the news stories. That way when finding each cache, we could just click on the link to read more about the event.

6000 years of Hellenic History-Argos Here's a series of caches (too bad they're in Greece. But I guess that would be the idea behind Hellenic History). Smiley emoticon placed here. There's bunches of historic information in this series.

A little more history Here's one that requires the finder to answer a question before they can claim the find.

You probably get the idea. With just a little imagination, geocaching can be used to create interest in just about any subject.

Geocaching at the Movies

"It's a geocache, Jim, but not as we know it..."

Follow this hilarious thread from the Groundspeak forums, where posters take geocaching to the movies. Click on the Captain and Mr Spock to be transported to that site.

Woohoo! new FTF

Another FTF for the Northwoods Geocats! Arriving home after lunch and a few errands, I checked my email and there was a message stating that rrice had published Rockford Crow1 - and no one had posted the FTF. We hadn't even taken our coats off, and back out the door we went. We were hoping that everyone was sitting in front of their TVs, waiting for the Super Bowl kickoff. Indeed they were!

Having lived in Rockford for a year we knew just where to park and just where to look. It didn't take long. The GPSr was right on station, leading us right to the cache. Footprints in the snow helped too. : ) Wayfarer dropped a travel bug and a geocoin.

Geocaching in California vs Minnesota

Somewhat of an unfair advantage. In California, you can geocache all year long. In Minnesota, geocaching in the winter could be a death wish. (Click on any picture to enlarge)

Okay, here's winter geocaching by the water in California.

Now, here's winter geocaching by the water in Minnesota.




Here's what Californians drive to the cache.

Now, here's what Minnesotans drive to the cache.

It's just not fair!

Trestle Collapses!

I usually don't point out the secrets of a geocache, but today, I'm making an exception. So if you don't want to know the truth about trestle collapses! stop reading now.

It was October 9th 1953, when 600 feet of the Minnesota Western Railroad trestle over Winstead Lake collapsed, sending nine cars filled with oats and corn into the lake.

Efforts to repair the trestle failed, and new tracks were laid, bypassing the lake. Today, the railroad bed is part of the rails to trails movement and has been converted to part of the western suburbs trail system.

That brings us to the geocache. A great idea. And a great place to put a geocache. The idea was to create a multi, with the first stage on one side of the trestle collapse, and the final stage on the other. Very historic. Bits and pieces of brick and steel are still there to be found.

Our first attempt ended with a big fat DNF. The hint, do not fall in, misled our search too close to the water's edge. We looked and looked, but to no avail.

Our second attempt was a bit more successful. We found the first stage. I was determined.

At the trails end is a park bench to sit & enjoy the view. I placed the GPSr on the bench and sat down to wait for the coords to settle in.

Now our GPSr may not be the newest and brightest, but if I set the thing down long enough, it will rival anything out there. And that bench was pretty danged close to GZ! So we went over it inch by inch. We looked at every screw on it, if by chance one was a fake. Nothing. We checked the bottom, thinking that the coords for the second stage were simply written there. Nothing.

Back to the GPSr. I knew that the cache couldn't be behind, or to the sides of the bench. From my best guess, it had to be about seven feet in front of it. But we had looked and looked all around there - and there's just no place to hide a cache. Nothing there but a 4 X 4 post stuck in the ground. Hmmmm. . . Don't tell me.

I swung around the back side of the post, and there, written in pencil were the coordinates for the second stage. Too bad they were illegible. We tried our best to read the numbers, even plugged what we thought they should be into the GPSr. No dice. So we walked back to the other side of the collapse and looked into every beacon over there. Nothing.

Click on photo to enlarge.