Ancient Artefacts

Ancient Artefacts (GCKQ76) by GeoMonkeys has been a geocache which had – until today, irritated and stumped us.

Our history with visiting this cache goes back to October 19th when we were still new to the hobby of geocaching. That first attempt was a steep learning curve in cache hunting. We searched high and low, discovered our GPS receivers aren’t always handy in some locations, and was the first time we were bitten by leeches – and gave up after an hour of searching.

In December the quest for Ancient Artifacts took on a new urgency as part of a larger goal to reveal the location of Catch the Cuckoo. TeamWolfie had information which lead us to believe the last of four treasured Cuckoo Eggs was hidden at the Ancient Artifacts cache – the fourth egg being our final key needed to reveal the much sought-after location of the Cuckoo.

Having had a new more caches under our belt and a more developed “geo-sense” we returned with confidence on December 13, only to leave again empty handed and with bloodstained socks from our leech feeding session. It turns out on this occasion Wolfie Guy was almost on top of the cache, but Wolfie Ben was convinced his teammate was barking up the wrong tree, and encouraged him to look elsewhere – thus ruining the team’s chances of finding the cache on this attempt.

On December 14 we returned yet again to follow up on some hunches we’d had overnight while thinking about the cache. Again no luck.

We were contacted by the owner of the cache, a Mr Pesky GeoMonkey, who offered us a little advice via email. The instructions made perfect sense, so we returned to the ruins of Ancient Artifacts again this morning at 8am with some new information at hand, and found the cache almost immediately.

Being so caught up in the moment, and fighting off an imminent leech attack we rushed the process, wrote down the vital Cuckoo clue, quickly signed the log, swapped a Sheep’s head for a sachet of Aloe skin cream (for our leech bites) – but we totally forgot to take our trademark “Wolfie” photograph of the area. 

We were out of there quick – we had a Cuckoo to Catch.

Vine Street

After our encounter with a young brown snake at Picadilly and abandoning the hunt for that cache, we headed off to the nearby Vine Street (GCYBTJ), another of the Monopoly series (orange colour square) by cphoenix.

By this time we were extra wary of snakes! When we approached GZ we found the likely spot for the cache to again be in a spot that looked like a great habitat for snakes and other nasties, so we approached with caution and made a lot of noise along the way, hitting the ground with our sticks in an effort to scare off any little surprises that might be waiting for us!

Landed on Vine Street. Pay $18 Wolfie!

Within a few minutes we had located the Vine Street cache. No snakes this time… we swapped a couple of plastic “bugs” from our Christmas Bon Bons for a couple of Football card, and placed the cache back in its resting place.

Picadilly (DNF)

From the main car park we walked over a kilometer to our next geocache hunt – Picadilly (GCYMJB), another of the cphoenix Monopoly series caches. Picadilly is a yellow square on the traditional English version of the game.

It was a lengthy but relatively flat walk out to this very isolated location. Along the way there was a sense of eeriness - being so isolated, quiet, the air heavy and muggy, and the sound of the bird life in this area was deafening at times.

On arrival at the lookout area we took in the scenery and made an effort to get a little closer to Ground Zero – which we found near a rocky area a little to the west of the lookout. The clue mentioning something about a cave had us climbing down the rocky outcrop in search of caves and openings.

We’d searched for about 10 minutes amongst the thick dry undergrowth, the day is hot – and I am always weary of snakes in these environments. 

My vigilance paid off. Just as I was climbing around the rocks to check out possible hiding places for this cache I encountered what I believe to be a juvenile brown snake – only about 30cm in length. According to Wikipedia, “The Eastern Brown Snake is the second most venomous land snake in the world“, so I wasn’t really keen to stick around in case it’s parents were about.

TeamWolfie made an executive decision to leave the area immediately – abandoning the hunt for this cache!