Today we went on a little geocaching trip that we had planned for a little while. Back in January, a series of 27 caches was published, 13 in Lepton, 13 in Kirkheaton, plus a bonus cache. Each of the caches being named after Yorkshire cachers – unfortunately not us! Both walks are circular, with parking available near the start of each walk.
We tackled the Lepton half of the walk today – for the simple reason that 3 of the Kirkheaton 13 are missing currently. While we were walking, I also decided to track our progress using the Endomondo iPhone app.
Endomondo.com is the place where you automatically track all your sports data and monitor your performance over time.
Anyway, here’s our walk:
The above screenshot is from the Endomondo site, with the 13 caches added on afterwards.
We went wrong in a couple of places – between A and B in particular, and we took a steeper route to reach G than we could have done, hence the spike where we had to detour to get to it.
The graphs show our speed and altitude over time. We walked 4.33km over 3 hours, 7 minutes and 58 seconds – an average of 1.4 km/h.
Clearly, we would have completed the route faster if we were able to find the 13 caches quicker! Now the graph is very spiky, and I’m not sure whether that is due to us needing to stop regularly to hunt, or poor coverage – my phone was in my pocket for the majority of the walk and Lepton is notoriously bad for mobile phone coverage anyway.
The 13 caches were generally very good.
- The F cache was by far my favourite, both in location and hide. It was based in a tree that had been felled over a brook – a beautiful little place. It was also our 350th cache find.
- Cache D was a tricky little one; the hint told us to look under a flat stone, but the ground was littered with flat stones… we got there in the end.
- The route to cache G gave us a few options, and we chose one that looked less steep than the rest. It turns out there was an even better, flatter route, given that the next cache made us double back on our selves.
- We couldn’t open the container that cache I was in, so we took a photo to prove we had found it and carried on.
- Cache J was located at the most uncomfortable bench in the world. So while a good rest was needed by this point, the bench made it impossible.
- Finally, the route from M to the car, was a nettle filled jungle of horribleness.
All in all, a good day. We haven’t really cached much recently due to work. But now that the holiday has begun, I hope we get a lot more days like this done. We have the other half of the series to do, but there’s not much point until all the caches are active again.
Related articles:
- Geocaching (wiseswords.wordpress.com)
- 5 apps for geocaching (tuaw.com)
- Geo Art Cache (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
- Geocaching: hide-and-seek in the digital age (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
