The Great Victorian Cache Crawl 2025 and Mathison Park
The Great Victorian Cache Crawl for 2025 came through Gippsland over the weekend of August 15, 16 and 17. A Cache Crawl is a weekend full of different geocaching activities that are designed to explore one particular area in Victoria. Gippsland was the chosen area for 2025. This year, approximately 80 teams from around Victoria and South Australia joined in the fun. The weekend started in Tooradin on Friday night.
Saturday started in Tooradin for breakfast and then travelled to Meeniyan, Moe, Maffra and through to Bairnsdale by Saturday night. The Crawl participants began Sunday in Paynesville and then travelled to Rosedale, Churchill and finished the weekend in Warragul.
For those who have not heard of geocaching, it is simply an outdoor treasure-hunting activity that uses a GPS-enabled device. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates, that they have sourced from geocaching website, and then attempt to find the 'geocache' usually a container or marker at that location. Geocaching is played all over the world and there are around twelve different types of caches to find.
One type of cache is an Event. Events bring fellow geocachers together for various reasons. One particular Event type is a CITO (Cache In, Trash Out). At CITO events, geocachers and community groups work together to help improve parks and other outdoor environments. Cachers assist with cleaning up rubbish, planting trees, removing invasive species, building trails, and more. CITO’s usually run for an hour’s duration.
On Sunday August 17, approximately 68 geocaching team rolled into Mathison Park from their lunch stop in Rosedale, for The Great Victorian Cache Crawl – Churchill CITO. This CITO Event assisted the Mathison Park Advisory Committee with an action-packed hour of weeding, mulching, tree planting, cleaning up old tree guards and rubbish removal. The weather was just perfect for an hour of intense work at four different spots around the Park. One group worked with Ruth to pick up old tree guards and stakes, another group worked with Reg to assist with blackberry and weed removal from a garden bed, a third group, Richard, Chris, Jim and Steve, assisted with planting out a garden bed and unloading and spreading mulch, and the final group wandered through the Park picking up rubbish. The final results at each area were fabulous and, what is more, all geocachers attending this Event, enjoyed the time they spent helping the Advisory Committee and roaming around the Park searching for the geocaches that are currently hidden there.
A big thank you to Ruth, Reg and the Advisory Committee team for swapping their usual working bee day to the Sunday to accommodate this CITO Event, and for all the work behind the scenes in organising the trailers of mulch, tools etc ready for the CITO Event attendees to roll in, work hard and roll out again.
The geocachers then headed to Warragul for the closing Event for this year’s Great Victorian Cache Crawl.
