TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » geocaching
Aug 10 2011
BFL Boot Camp is an annual night caching gathering held in North Halton by the Keepers of the Order of the BFL, or simply “The BFL Crew”. This group of cachers head out every friday night looking for geocaches hidden throughout the Greater Toronto Area. One night each year, the tables are turned – and the BFL Crew hides the caches, and hosts an event. This is the 6th year we have held the event.
Most event caches feature caching followed by a meal at a pub. Not this event – our tradition is to meet at a local pub, then send everyone out to look for the caches over the rest of the night. We set up a “command centre” where you can interact with other cachers, chat with the BFL Crew, or simply warm up with some hot chocolate. The pub portion of the event runs typically from 7pm to 9pm, and the caching runs from 9pm to 4am.
We have two “events” hosted on Geocaching.com:
- GC31VTF – BFL Boot Camp VI – Briefing Pub (Not published yet – still working out which pub to take over)
This is a gathering before the night caching where cachers may get together and share stories, or group up for the upcoming night caching session in the woods. The pub is still being organized, so it has not been activated on Geocaching.com just yet - GC2YVBH – BFL Boot Camp VI – Retro Reflect
Is the main geocaching event. This is the location of the “command centre”.We’ll be out there in the woods from 9:30pm to 4:00am.
The event this year is being held on October 29.
Dec 13 2010
Several Toronto area geocachers were interviewed for a new local magazine, Journey ON!. The magazine features articles about travel and adventure in Ontario. northernpenguin (yup, that’s me), teamvoyagr and chris-mouse were interviewed at the BFL Boot Camp event last October.
The caches I referred to in the article are the Tour de Matchedash series, and Languages.
The earthcache is Juicepig’s Sudbury Astrobleme
You can view the magazine online here, or skip right to the article text here.
The magazine is also embedded below, if you can view Adobe Flash content:
Dec 03 2010
Groundspeak’s Official Geocaching App got an update this morning to handle a peculiar bug introduced when geocachers updated to iOS 4.2.1.
When I upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 4.2.1, I experienced this issue myself. You’d search for a cache, and when you selected “Navigate to Geocache” it would initially route to N/S0.0 E/W0.0, which is off the coast of Africa. There was a workaround, where you pick the cache again on the map and “Set as Target”. Apparently, Apple quietly changed something in the location APIs and this was not something Groundspeak could have anticipated.
Geocachers in Toronto found themselves 9,100km from the closest geocache.
This has been fixed in the 4.2.1 update from Groundspeak. Also, 4.2 added Retina display support for iPhone 4 owners, and allowed the map screen to track you as you approach the geocache.
iPhone App 4.2 Release Notes (on Groundspeak’s site)