Old Scribbly

Further along in the region of the Somersby plateau is another of the Geomonkeys hides, Old Scribbly (GCH2MY) – located on a serene section of the Great North Walk – a 250km walking track linking the cities of Sydney and Newcastle.

We have already found many geocaches located along the Great North Walk – including Mooney Valley Micro, Ourimbah Trackhead, Dead Horse Creek and Coventry Street. No doubt there are many more. Thankfully you don’t have to walk the 250km in one session!  Usually, as is the case with Old Scribbly, there is a place nearby where the walk intersects with a road where you can park relatively close to the cache – in this case, Old Scribbly is about 300m down the track off Robinson Road at Somersby.

Recent rain had left parts of the track a little muddy – something to be aware of before venturing down to Old Scribbly.

It was a relatively short, flat, easy walk through the quiet and dense forest. Small animal tracks either side of the human track provided evidence of an abundance of wildlife in the area, although none were to be seen today (that we noticed, anyway).

The Old Scribbly cache was a wonderful find in a wonderful grand old scribbly bark tree. Considering the age of the cache, it’s in excellent condition. This medium sized geocache was of the biscuit container variety – of the type I have not seen since I was a young child in the 1970s! We left a Red Gem, took a small Rabbit – and signed the Log Book.

Old Scribbly Scribbles will lead you to the cache

From the picture, you can see why this tree is called a scribbly-bark tree – and this one is particularly old and prominent. Thank you Geomonkeys for bringing us to another exciting location that we would otherwise have never known existed.

GC1G8RT – A Suspicious Sighting at the Forest

It was a miserable cloudy Saturday afternoon on the Central Coast, so what better thing to do than go out for a spot of Geocaching. This time, we decided to head north-west in the direction of the Strickland State Forest for a find, and later a hide. Our first mission is load up some coordinates into our Mio and iPhone and go off in search of cache GC1G8RT – A Suspicious Sighting at the Forest.

I already knew the general area – having driving past this location on numerous occasions, but always having been blissfully unaware of what lay beyond the trees visible from the roadway. Geocaching gives you a great excuse to get out and explore, and discover these previously unseen places. For example – I had no idea there was a dam here!  Not a large dam, and not one that I’d swim in – but a dam nonetheless. 

A Suspicious Sighting Indeed!

Just a word of advice when around dams – beware of snakes. They love hanging out near dams, and the gullies that lead into them. Not that we encountered any snakes today, but I thought it would be prudent to mention this fact in case you should decide to venture to this location!

There’s a parking bay nearby, and a large open area used by the Model Aircraft club, with an appropriate warning sign for visitors to beware of low-flying model aircraft!  A few muggles hanging around the the club’s facilities watched us from a distance as we tracked our way across the field toward GZ.  It wasn’t an obvious path down to the dam, but negotiable anyway – with a few tricky steps and large rocks to clamber across.

Zeroing in on GZ, the cryptic clue for this cache came in quite handy. After a few minutes I managed to locate the cache with the help of my iPhone’s GPS combined with Google Satellite view – showing my location the the cache location. Great stuff – providing you can maintain a phone signal for the data!

We eagerly opened the cache, but disappointingly found it to be water-logged.  The log sheet within was absolutely soaked – it was useless trying to rescue. There was about 1cm of water floating around inside the container. It beats me how this much water is able to penetrate a sealed plastic container!  As good geocachers we emptied out the water and did what we could with the limited resources we had available – but we really weren’t prepared for this. It needs a new log sheet – perhaps in a sealed plastic bag. Maybe a new pen too.

We would have relocated the cache to a drier location had one been obvious, but there wasn’t one to be seen.

It was a waste of time even trying to write anything on the water-logged sheet, so we left a little TeamWolfie calling card instead – but even this, made of paper, is unlikely to survive.  I guess the best thing for us to do is log a maintenance flag on the cache and hopefully the owner can get to it soon.

Getting out of here was much easier than getting in. We found a quicker and easier path – it lead us straight back out to the roadway – bypassing the open field where the model aircraft muggles congregate.

About an hour after we left there was a torrential downpour in the area, which sadly would have affected this cache even more.