Expedition report: The hunt for Alberta’s first geocache

Early in the morning yesterday The Rocket Scientists‘ official expedition vehicle departed from the HQ and headed east towards the Strathcona Wilderness Centre carrying three brave explorers. The sun was out and it looked like a gorgeous day was in the makings. Our mission was simple, first locate the oldest cache in Alberta, the Strathcona Wilderness 1 cache and second, find as many additional caches in the  Strathcona Wilderness Centre as possible.

About one year ago The Rocket Scientists visited the Strathcona Wilderness Centre and did some geocaching in the western part of the park. During this expedition we found 10 caches in single day, a record that still stands today. The Strathcona Wilderness 1 cache is located in the eastern part of the park and there are about a dozen other caches in this part of the park that we did not look for last time. In other words there was the potential for breaking our record from last year.

After being greeted by a Hairy woodpecker at the trail head we set out on our quest to locate Alberta’s oldest geocache, which also happens to be Canada’s second geocache.

Alberta’s oldest geocache is a good old fashion ammo box.

The description calling for wildlife trails and a large aspen tree were spot on, except that the tree had met its demise and only a tallish stump is now standing. After a whole lot of crawling through the underbrush we finally found our prize. A whole year of anticipation had finally been realized.

After finding the Strathcona Wilderness 1 cache we were all fired up and went on finding cache number 2 (Coyote Ugly), 3 (Wagon’s Ho), and 4 (Owl meets Wagon) in a rapid succession. Followed by lunch at the lodge and then three more caches (Snowshoe Cache Trail, Coyote Run and Speedy’s Hit 500) before dark clouds rolled in and thunder and rain broke loose. We made a dash thorough the forest back to the car arriving soaked to the bones just in time for the rain to finish.

A few other noteworthy events include surprising a ruffed grouse and somehow getting between her and her chick as she unleashed her wrath on us + finding our first travel bug, Max’s Puck. Yay.

A very upset ruffed grouse mother making a fast retreat after viciously attacking us.

We found little friendly frogs along the trails.

Max’s Puck, our first travel bug. Now we just have to take this little guy out to a game before passing him on. He was release in August 2007 and has travelled across all of North America tallying over 13000km in 5 years.

In the end we found seven caches, which falls short of our record 10 finds from our last visit, but we cannot complain. All in all it was a glorious expedition, we not only achieve our goal of finding Alberta’s oldest geocache, we also saw lots of wildlife (frogs, grouse, squirrels, blackbirds), we found our first travel bug, and we were chased by lightning and a good down pour. More pictures from the expedition can be found on flickr.

This is from the “The Rocket Scientists” blog ( http://therocketscientists.ca ).