Geocaching at Mer Bleue on Friday the 13th – Topo Map of the Week

Topographic Map of Mer Bleue, Ottawa, Ontario

The Mer Bleue Conservation Area near Ottawa, Ontario provides a wonderful location for many outdoor activities including:

• hiking in the summer,
• skiing and snowshoeing in the winter,
• and geocaching all year round

The area is managed by Canada’s National Capital Commission. Free access is provided to the public.

GeoCaching around Mer Bleue

Geocachers can sometimes be a superstitious lot and sometimes not. There are geocaches on and near grave sites and churchyards and ones that will take you out in the middle of nowhere, testing your nerve. Some geocaches will even take you out in the middle of nowhere at night and have you sit in the cold, shivering, shining your flash light around, hoping to see something reflect light back at you, telling you where to go next. You hope.

This is essentially how Friday the 13th went for some of us this past November. We met for all-you-can-eat sushi and then set out to find 13 geocaches by midnight on Friday the 13th. This would mark two geocachers’ 1300th finds, assuming that we could find all 13. One of the two was the one that coordinated all of this, he was the one that had decided on 13 on the 13th for 1300 was appropriate, so naturally he was the one that decided on where we were going.

Naturally he was the one we were blaming when it was 10pm, we were traipsing through an old garbage dump and we hit water. Two of us weren’t prepared for water since it hadn’t rained for two weeks.  We then had to turn around and find others in the area. So after quickly finding some “drive-bys”, we went back to the Mer Bleue Bog to find the 13th cache of the evening, one appropriately called “Friday the 13th”. This cache was put out as part of an event that took place on an earlier Friday the 13th.

The Final GeoCache – #13

So, with a larger crowd of geocachers, we parked on the side of a road and started walking in. The terrain wasn’t too bad until we detoured away from the path, into the bush. After a bit of dodging pointy tree branches and leafless bushes, someone called out that we were at Ground Zero – in other words, the cache should be near.

We started searching. Well, some of us started searching while the others, many of whom had already found the cache, stood back in anticipation. The obvious tree was searched. No cache! We had little more than twenty minutes to find this cache, had it gone missing? Were we out of luck? There wasn’t anything else in the area and the last person found the cache over a month prior. Could it be gone?

“FOUND IT!” came the exhuberant cry from the next tree where the cache was safely tucked away. The bystanders cheered, pictures were taken, banana bread came out of somewhere and was shared. Despite some bad luck trying to find too many multi-caches in the dark in a short time frame, the two geocachers got their 13 caches for 1300 total. The rest of us just got some very tasty banana bread.

Make your own Topographic Maps of Mer Bleue

Create your own maps of the Mer Bleue Bog with MapSherpa. Search for Mer Bleue and it will bring you to the region where you can navigate the map to get your own personalized map of the area.