A Simple Life of Luxury

Hiding gecoaches for others to find can be rewarding. It can also be quite time-consuming. First you have to identify a suitable hiding place, then you have to create the cache itself, hide it, write a description and possible devise a puzzle for it and then create the listgin on the geocaching.com website and finally get it approved by a Grounspeak Reviewer. After that you have to maintain the cache thoughout its liftime.

So, it is always good when people write nice things about your cache in their logs and a recent log on my ‘Watery Wales 1‘ series of caches by ’scrap happy annie’ made it all worthwhile.

The log said:

Now this is all what geocaching is about - bringing us to beautiful areas we would never have known about.

Thank you very much for this wonderful series of caches - I was in awe at all 4 of them.

This was our first find - we did it in a heavy mist and did not realise the lake was there until my husband nearly fell into it! It gave him a bit of a shock and me a bit of a laugh. The mist cleared whilst we were signing the log - what a lovely place.

and

Left a great container geocoin here because I am so impressed with this fantastic series of caches - well done to forcesofnature for concieving such a brilliant set of geocaches.

Thanks Scrap Happy Annie…. Glad you enjoyed them.

I haven’t been for a walk in the hills for ages so decided to head off to the north side of Cadair Idris on Saturday for a walk and to do some geocaches.

I parked at Ty Nant and walked back along the road a little way to the Gwernan Hotel and the start of the Foxes path. It was pretty wet and as soon as I started gaining some height the clouds smothered me and visibility was pretty low. It wasn’t in any rush and I’d never been up this path before so I took my time and took in what little I could see of my surroundings. After about 45 minutes I reached the stream that was coming from Goat Lake (Llyn Gafr) only to find that it was a raging torrent. There was no easy way across so I had no choice but to wade through with water up to my thighs.

The first geocache of the day was nearby (Cadair Idris - Goat Lake) and I found it easily before heading on up a steeper climb towards Llyn y Gadair and a second gecoache (Cadair Idris - Llyn y Gadair). Once again there was another very wet river crossing just before the cache… I was being made to work hard for my caches today.

From here, rather than continue up into the gloom and on towards the summit I followed the edge of the lake around and then headed off west towards the Pony Path along the foot of Cyfrwy. On this fairly indistinct path I met a couple of walkers coming the other way who were a little disorientated so I put them back on track and then headed off towards the Pony Path.

Once on the pony path I headed up again towards a third cache (Kadair Kats) and then further up the path towards a fourth cache (Cadair Kites) which I didn’t manage to find.

The weather was still pretty bad so I turned back and headed back down the Pony Path to the car after a fairly short but nice walk in the hills. I may not have been able to see much and I did get very wet but that is all part of the fun of walking in the hills.

Mountain Stream Cadair Idris

Mountain Stream Cadair Idris

Mist and Murk at the bottom of Cadair Idris