The 8th Anniversary of Geocaching in Canada was held yesterday, June 28th, 2008, at the Graves Island Provincial Park and a great time was had by all! The day was in celebration of Canada’s first Geocache which was hidden by local Geocacher “eastriver” on June 28th, 2000, less than two months after the world’s first Geocache was hidden by David Ulmer in Oregon, USA on May 3rd, 2000.

The cache is located just off Highway 103 in Nova Scotia about a 30 minute drive from Halifax. It was originally named GC41 but was relisted as GCBBA when Geocaches were taken out of the Geocaching.com site admin account. Apparently a typing error also occurred at that time and the date was changed to June 18th, 2000. The date has since been corrected to reflect the original cache placement date of June 28th, 2000.

On June 24th, 2006 a Geostone giving the details and co-ordinates of GCBBA was unveiled at the Graves Island park which is only a few kilometers from the cache site. The Geostone was built and designed by Geocacher Wallace_River. Plans are now in the works for another plaque to be placed at the actual site of GCBBA.

This was the third year for this annual event and the number of Geocachers attending has steadily grown with this years event drawing 148 Geocachers! For a number of Cachers it was a weekend event which began earlier in the week with camping on site. There was a pancake breakfast on the morning of the event and a potluck supper after the event which by all indication was not to be missed.

There were lots of activities to keep you busy throughout the day. There are several Geocaches in the immediate area including Canada’s First Cache and an EarthCache. There were also several event Geocaching games for both young and old such as:

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Last week, while in Roseville, California for GeoWoodstock VI, we spent a day Geocaching at Folsom Lake State Recreation Area. The park is located in the Sierra-Nevada foothills about 25 miles east of Sacramento and it offers lots of trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding. Since we didn’t bring a horse or a bike we stuck to the hiking.

Throughout the weekend we were warned about the creepy-crawlies that inhabit North California, like rattle snakes and tarantulas as well as poison oak. Since we come from an area where the worse thing that can find you is a tick or maybe an angry duck we thought that today might qualify as a Challenge Cache. We were very careful to tap the caches with our walking sticks, watch where we stepped and jumped around and made noise. It must have worked because all we saw were eagles, lizards, chipmunks and deer.

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