Saturday, March 01, 2014

My First Geo-Art: The Question Mark Series

Today I completed my first geo-art series.

If you are not familiar, geo-art is a series of geocaches that are arranged in such a way that it looks like an image when viewed on a map.  Often these caches take the form of puzzles, since puzzles can have coordinates listed pretty much anywhere.

The series in question is 16 puzzles that created the image of, appropriately enough, a question mark.  Each puzzle builds on the one before it. So to solve the 16th puzzle you have to solve the 15th, which requires information from the 14th's puzzles solution etc.

Todays mission was to turn a quizzical series of questions marks into a quizzical series of smilies.

Last week my in-laws were in town, so I spent many of the evenings solving these puzzles.  Today, after attending a lunch event nearby, I headed out to find the caches.  Another local cacher by the name gbmcache, and the CO (who both happened to also be at the event) came with me.

It was actually quite fortunate that the CO came along as one of the caches was missing (construction being the nemesis of the urban geocache). He was able to replace it for us on the spot (convenient eh? - I highly reccomend bringing the CO along on all your cache runs).

It took me about 6 hours to solve all the puzzles, and about 2 hours to find them all.  Not to shabby.

This was my first geo-art, and it was fun.  I also, somewhere along the way, hit 2800n finds, giving this series of caches a special place in my personal geocaching history.

You can find the cache listings for this series here.

Have you found any geo-art caches?  Let me know in the comments below.