Manitoba caches in waiting...

Four themed caches are ready to go, with a new voice - the cousin of the Dales, the wonderful Manitoba creature, coming out of hibernation in Birdshill Park, just north of Winnipeg.

The creature is expected to be in sight by early July. For now you can wet your appetite for the hunt by looking at the cache pages on the gatherer3 website, thought the geocaching.com listing will not go live until the creature's first been heard.

Hunter Gatherer 's Canadian Cousin Comes out of Hibernation!

We've been out geocaching today near Selkirk (some great historical-trail caches with postcards to collect from each of the 24 sites) and in Birdsall Park.

Collected a few travellers - my first one each of: travel bug (Ottoman), geocoin (originally from Germany) and a glass trackable disc (made in Manitoba). They may just help to welcome the magical Manitoban creature as it wakes from hibernation over the next few days....

Conistone FTF 28th May

Lovely comments from Turkey Nuggets, the FTF at Coniston, who emailed in photos of their grid and text from the log book, thankyou
- great to hear you enjoyed it, really makes the work setting everything up worthwhile :)

I've taken the liberty of translating this first crayon grid into an iphone grid and sending it on to the creature and the gallery.... don't forget the cache key opens up parts of the website, too!
And if you check back later in the summer the creature may just sing back in response to the grids and text you've sent!

I made this colour grid at 

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=54.10337,-2.03313 using http://twitter.com/gathererapp

First Cache Live

Today sees the Hunter Gatherer Birthplace, Ingleton  cache go live!
The gatherer3 website's not quite live yet, so anyone finding the cache will have to wait a little longer before unlocking the secrets of their cache key. However the main role of this cache is to introduce the story and gather responses from the cache hunters, which is all live, up and running, just waiting for the first geoartcachers to respond....

And there's room to respond to the project on the geoartcache site too.

Day Trip to the Dales

The mayblossom is in flower! The magical creature is out of hibernation!

I've been working round the clock to get everything in place to deliver the cache boxes this week.. another trip to the Dales, this time a day trip, with a dawn start and midnight return.
The drive went well - through Leeds before the morning rush hour. And it was wonderful to pause for a late breakfast with my flask of coffee still steaming beside the bridge at Burnsall.

Then on to meet various landowners and agree locations for the caches to reside over the summer. Chrysalis have asked us to work with National Trust sites as far as possible, so we don't have access issues as the Trust supports the project, and guidelines for cache locations are already in place through the geocaching community and the National Park.

However some sites just call, regardless of boundaries or deeds!
Three of myne fall outside the Trust lands, so I've got a busy day ahead.. plus some extra filming to make sure I have a good variety of material to work with over the summer as the creature calls and the hunters respond.

Beautiful light today, friendly, welcoming people so generous with their time and interest.

In planning for this visit I was struck with the different paces of communication in the world today. Yesterday I called one site by phone, had a long chat with someone working there, a really helpful conversation with the owner who called me back soon after, and today I meet them and am shown around, suggested the best places for caching, and given a cream egg with my coffee: very welcome after the long drive!

Phone-calls, face to face meeting and the time to sit and wait whilst jobs are done to benefit from the generosity of another's time are all too rare at times. In some areas of my current work-life it would probably take 3 weeks and a lot of email disjunction to set up a meeting with the right person at the right time in the right place..  or more!

It's a refreshing day all round.

2 Magical Caches

I revisited the magnetic nano cache at the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday, before a quick, wonderful, whizz through 5 centuries of the most inspiring and communicative artworks. The ancient Greeks certainly knew a thing or five about bringing magical creatures into existence... Imagine finding a cache of such delicate goldwork from several millennia past!

And yesterday I set off for a walk in one of my favourite woods, on the Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset periphery, following a path i'd never been on before in search of the Four Forts Part 2 Cache. The fragrance of bluebells was divinely gentle and uplifting, and absolutely magical light streaming through the new beech leaves and vibrant strong green grass of spring. The cache leads to a Motte and Bailey that was curiously familiar:

Geocache and colour grid responses combined

Today was a day full of ideas flowing and threads coming together, so I decided to enjoy the sunshine and give the dogs a treat by going out to Bradgate Park for a run through of an experimental walks workshop activity I'm planning for later this week. Of course I've now got the geocache bug, so decided to kill two birds with one stone (do twice the research at one go, I'm not sure about the killing birds metaphor really!) and have a look and see if there's any caches around or near the park. The geocache.com map of caches in and around Leicester is quite staggering! I ended up downloading a free trial of the Groundworks app which would check for local caches when I get there. Ended up exploring Rough Hill Woodlands looking for the Great Galaxy Seekers' cache... and allowing myself 3 moments to document along the way (the third of course had to be finding the cache...)

Rough Wood Location 1, everything flows

1, flow

A sense of all the parts coming onto harmonious being

2, new beginnings, growth, endless cycles of nature
2, location of catkins

How simple the geocache app is on iphone4, great woods, planted as part of new national forest, dogs happy, beautiful golden late afternoon light, and somewhere to park without spending loads on a parking ticket ( especially useful as I didn't think about cash when getting grids, colours, caches and device ready, and 26p ain't enough these days!)

Grid 2: response, new growth

3, location of Success!

Only just dark at 6pm - what a treat, spring really feels on the way!

So, back in the warm inside, and cache logged on the website, I'm completing my response experiments.

An overview for the whole walk, and a 'perception' diagram based on the things that caught my attention on the way.

I've made two copies of the colour grid responses, one set to go onto the perception diagram, the other onto a 'measuring' chart which I made before I set out. They're very sketchy and by no means at final form, but do give an indication to test out how I could work with different ways of perceiving, that come from the walkers themselves. I'm interested in the extent to which making a structure after and before the walk give different frameworks and throw up different relationships between the walker's moments and also the walkers and other attributes. 

On this walk, my attention was quite different to other walks - influenced heavily by the limitation of 3 notations, and the excitement of the treasure hunt for the cache - and maybe using the app to follow my location, too. They were hard to 'define'. On reflection, I settled on : state of being, sight, emotion and emotion as the ways in which my attention had been triggered.

Here are the two charts as rough sketches.

As an aside: The numbering of the colour grids is to trace the sequence in which each square is filled - this informs colour grid animations and enriches the data that can be used later ... in ways yet to be revealed!

Observations:

I find the drawings fascinating: there is so much information in them. 

I'm not convinced about the recoloured grids. At first I wasn't keen on the smaller size, but actually the scale is right for these sheets of paper and drawings. The denseness of the colouring makes them quite different to the spontaneous ones made on location - and that's something that I now will be of consideration with the iphone app to record colour blocks instead of using paper and pens or crayons. But I think the main thing is that there need to be more - from other people. I'm convinced the secrets lie in the relationships between the groups of colour grids made by one person and another, or by people at synchronous times in comparison to people at other times or places. between cohorts, not individual responses necessarily. So I'm keen to see how this scales up when the relationships of one person's varied experience to anothers are implicit and explicit.

Ah! They need to be viewed side by side.... Two pictures next to eachother become the two halves of the brain. Each moment is perceived as a unified experience (colour grids occur in both pictures) but each is read, networked and related to differently, according to the underlying structure of that half of the brain and its functions. [Or substitute 'brain' for mind/body, yin/yang, inner/outer, etc]

...Wouldn't have expected that to have come out of this exercise!!

So a moment not so much of paying particular attention , more of feeling part of the flow ...

Found first geocache!

Location of my first (found) geocache!

"Bridge 169 - Under and Over" hidden in 2008 by Silver01Fox

Just outside Gargrave: