Geocaching in Montréal

A week was spent in Mon­tréal, win­ing, din­ing and explor­ing both old and new. While there, Heather and I had the oppor­tu­nity to do some geo­caching. Not only was this a new expe­ri­ence for Heather, it was also the first time I had been out geo­caching in almost 10 years. Only now do I remem­ber how frus­trat­ing it can be when you can’t find any of the geo­caches you have set out to look for. Heather and I man­aged to locate 1 of 7 geo­caches dur­ing our trip and we took plea­sure out of find­ing it in the mid­dle of a con­crete jungle.

...in Montréal

Mon­tréal is a great city for geo­caching, with hun­dreds of caches, both urban and nat­ural caching fiends will be over­whelmed by the options. Heather and I used geocaching.com to locate our geo­caches and nar­row down our search to easy or begin­ner level dif­fi­culty hides. We soon found out that easy and begin­ner do not nes­sas­ar­ily garaun­tee that you will find the cache on your first, sec­ond or third time out look­ing for it. Our first cache of the day was quickly found and logged as we explored the Old City of Montréal.

Stretch…

…like a giraffe!

We also man­aged to locate the first step of a geo­cache at the nearby Quai Alexan­dra Port but failed to deci­pher the clue and locate the geo­cache itself. All in all, we had a super time explor­ing the city while try­ing to locate these geo­caches. It was cer­tainly an expe­ri­ence well lived as we find our­selves think­ing about the clues and the loca­tions where the geo­caches could have been hid­den. Our trip to Mon­tréal has inspired Heather and I to try our own geo­caching here in Toronto, but this time, we would like to be the hunted! We talked about pos­si­ble loca­tions to hide the cache and whether or not we would like to cre­ate a multi-cache (multi-step cache). Other pos­si­bil­i­ties, such as a nov­elty cache based on car­tog­ra­phy had been up in the air as well.

Hiding our own Geocache

I would like to talk about the geo­cache that Heather and I have decided to set up in homage to our love for geog­ra­phy and in the midst of com­plet­ing our Geo­graphic Analy­sis degree at Ryer­son Uni­ver­sity. All things con­sid­ered, one of the most impor­tant con­cepts of geo­graphic analy­sis remains: loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion. A spa­tially ref­er­enced ques­tion, such as where do you live, is at the heart of many geo­graphic based stud­ies. There­fore, we have decided to start a geo­cache that con­tains not only a log­book with a space for your name, but also a col­umn for each geo­cachers postal code. The postal code rep­re­sents the gen­eral area you reside in and is very use­ful when geo­g­ra­phers want to map out spa­tial phenomena.

This geo­cache idea will serve the pur­pose of col­lect­ing spa­tial infor­ma­tion of geo­cachers ori­gin such that their loca­tions can be plot­ted on an online map. This would be a spin-off project that I hope to work on, which would encom­pass dis­cov­er­ing the activ­ity of our own geo­cache, specif­i­cally answer­ing the ques­tion: where are our geo­cachers from?

Stay tuned for an update as to when the geo­cache is in play,

Cheers!

 
 
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