By Nadia Stuewer
Geocaching is a fun outdoor activity which involves search for a small item (the geocache) that other people have hidden and marked its location on a geocaching app. All you need is a smartphone that has a GPS, which most smartphones do, and some curiosity. These geocaches are found all over Ottawa, including Lowertown. My partner and I discovered geocaching during the pandemic. We were going for a lot of walks and looking for geocaches made the walks more exciting. It gave us a new perspective on our neighbourhood and we explored areas we hadn’t spent much time in.
The geocache, or cache, is usually a plastic or metal container that contains a logbook and a pencil or pen, so people who find it can add their names and the date on which they found it. The app, called Geocaching, tells you the size of the cache, ranging from mini to large, so you get some idea of what to look for, and gives you a clue. The cache itself is marked on the app but once you get there you have to look for it because it is hidden. Some caches contain little trinkets which you may take if you leave something of equal or greater value. The trinkets we’ve found so far were mostly coins and plastic toys like you get in Kinder eggs. Geocache containers can be any shape. Mostly we’ve found Tupperware, but some were metal tins, and in one case a tube. They can be wedged into a tree trunk, hung from a branch, attached to metal with a strong magnet or nestled among some rocks. They are generally not buried in the ground so you don’t need to bring a shovel.
The geocaching app gives you the GPS coordinates of a cache, which aren’t 100% accurate. In our experience, some caches have been easy to find, but some were impossible. If you’re really stuck, you can email the owner of the cache for an extra clue. We once spent half an hour at a site looking everywhere (or so we thought) but hadn’t considered all the angles and could only find it when we finally lay down on our backs. The hardest caches to find have been in the forest. There are too many trees and the containers were camouflaged!
While the app is free, you can pay for a premium version that shows you more caches for less than $40 a year. (We have not tried this ourselves.) There are few geocaches in Lowertown itself, but a fair number close by. Our latest foray was to a couple of caches near the New Edinburgh side of the Minto Bridges. We found one of them, but the other one remains a mystery. Other geocaches can be found in the park between the Rideau Falls, near the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge, near the Mint, in Major’s Hill Park, and several further afield off Lees Avenue. We need more people to get out and hide caches in Lowertown!
Geocaching is a great way to explore your environment, get some fresh air and exercise, and get to know some small parts of your neighbourhood intimately as you search for that elusive cache.
Learn more about geocaching at https://www.geocaching.com/play”