Lake Bottom Cache

What better way to experiment with my new toy, a Garmin Geko 201 GPS, than to try my hand at Geocaching?

Geocaching is a kind of treasure hunt; it strikes me as a high-tech version of Letterboxing, which is a lot of fun in its own right. The idea, briefly, is that someone has hidden a cache, a little container holding a log book and perhaps other trinkets. Provided with the latitude and longitude of the cache, your goal is to find it, sign the log book, and perhaps contribute to the fluctuating contents of the cache.

Lawrence Swamp Conservation Area

I picked “Lake Bottom” because it was nearby and because it was in the Lawrence Swamp Conservation Area. I’ve been meaning to explore Lawrence Swamp for a long time (I drive by on my way to and from the airport, so I’ve been by there…a lot).

It was a beautiful, warm sunny afternoon.

Robert Frost Trail

The trail was impassably wet in places and a bit overgrown, but on the whole it was well marked and just lovely.

Dappled Sunlight

The wetland plants certainly seemed to enjoy the environment. There were also lots of signs of beaver activity, with a couple of dams contributing to the general wetness.

Woodland Iris

Happily, no where was it so wet that you couldn’t just walk around the obstructions. I’m not very happy with the exposure in these photos. I’d turned on “spot metering” early in the walk, probably to get good focus on the Teaberry.

Teaberry

But leaving it on for high-contrast scenes like the ferns in dappled sunlight resulted in some pretty harsh images.

Deep Woods

I found the cache! So I’m one-for-one at the moment.

Lake Bottom Geocache

I’ll be looking for more and I’ll probably report them here, but I’ll stick “cache” in the essay title so you can easily find them or ignore them depending on your inclination.

Bug spray. Those are my final words on the topic. You want to make sure you bring more bug spray.