People sometimes ask me how we choose locations for our microadventures. Well, there are a number of considerations: closeness to Toronto, whether we’ve been to the place before (although we do like to go back to the same places, especially in different seasons), the number and length of hiking trails, etc. The decisive factor, however, is the number of geocaches hidden around.

When people hear about geocaching, quite often they reply with “oh, yeah, it’s like Pokémon Go.” Uh, no, geocaching is nothing like Pokémon Go. Well, there are some similarities: in both cases you are looking for something while using technology. But that’s where similarities end. The geocaching ‎website calls it the world’s largest treasure hunt, and that’s how I see it – a treasure hunt where the biggest treasure you discover is connections (and an occasional trinket that you can swap for something of your own). That means connections to the environment as you need to observe various land forms and natural features, be able to use a compass and read clues. Plus each geocache is a real physical object, not a figment of someone’s imagination on the screen, so by locating it you are connecting not only with whoever placed it there but also hundreds of geocachers who have found it before and will find it after you.

For the record, I am not anti Pokémon Go. At least it gets people outside (although I am not sure if it’s even a thing anymore). I just think geocaching is way more fun.

How we headed for Mount Nemo and ended up at Rattlesnake Point

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So a few weeks ago we were all set to go geocaching, and hiking, at Mount Nemo Conservation Area in Burlington. We visited Mount Nemo before but that was in our pre-geocaching days so there were 15 still undiscovered caches waiting. Then, on the way to the park our son realized that he’d left his geocaching pack at home. Going back would’ve taken too much time so we decided to put off the Mount Nemo adventure for next week and go to Rattlesnake Point instead. Sure, we wouldn’t be geocaching but there were other cool things to discover.

We visited Rattlesnake Point last year, but this time it looked completely different, way more festive with most of its fall foliage still in the trees, a lot of it still, surprisingly, green.

  

  

We started with the Buffalo Crag Trail, which led us to the lookout over the Nassagaweya Canyon. There is a seven-kilometre Nassagaweya Trail that connects Rattlesnake Point to Crawford Lake ‎Conservation Area but it was too late in the day to embark on that adventure.

So we retraced our steps back to the Rattlesnake Point lookout and then proceeded onto the Vista Adventure Trail. It took us to the Nelson, Pinnacle and Trafalgar lookouts over the Lowville Valley where we could see Mount Nemo in the distance.

  

  

Our son tried a bit of climbing, we took a few photos and then it was time to go back.

  

We took the wrong turn on our way out of the park and ended up touring the campground area. Most of the sites were occupied. They also looked quite spacious and private so I thought with it being only 30 minutes away from Toronto, Rattlesnake Point could be a great spot for a very last minute ‎unplanned getaway.

Mount Nemo, finally

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Next week we were back on the road to Mount Nemo, this time making sure we brought the geocaching pack.

It was an unusually warm November day. The ground was covered with a thick leaf carpet, but there was also lots of foliage still holding on to the trees and with sunlight seeping through the forest was glowing.

  

Albert Camus once called autumn “the second spring where every leaf is a flower.” There were also a few actual flowers scattered between those autumn blooms.

  

  

  

  

My favourite part was the birch ‎grove: the sparkling white of the bark against ‎the bright yellows and the geometry of shadows.

And, of course, the views: the checked spread of the  Lowville Valley down below with Rattlesnake Point on the other side this time.

  

  

The park has two loops: North and South. We covered them both, some parts twice, in search of geocaches.

  

In the end we found seven and also scored a few geocaching firsts along the way, like the largest cache we’ve ever seen.

  

We also met some fellow geocachers. Let me‎ backtrack a little to explain something about geocaching. Somehow our son believes it is a super secret activity. Never mind that it has its website and lots of places, like the Conservation Halton parks, promote geocaching as one of the activities to try. He continues to insist on being discrete, whenever he is looking for geocaches. Which is not always easy with all the people around and it is often our role to provide distractions. So when we came across a couple looking all shifty and pretending they were just hanging around near the spot where a cache was supposed to be, we recognized fellow geocachers. After about five minutes of our two groups circling around the area pretending we weren’t looking for anything in particular, someone had to finally say: “I think we are looking for the same thing.” Eventually we located the cache, signed in and moved on. We kept seeing their nickname on the other caches we found later that day. As I said, connections…