J of Diamonds - Know When to Hold 'Em (WestCoast) Hochstetter, South Island, New Zealand
By gracie7 + Mum on 23-Nov-13. Waypoint GC4VHZZ

Rattll and I are on a three week road trip of the South Island. Today we're focusing on the Grey Valley and surrounding area, starting in Greymouth. Our main target today is to complete the flowers series, along with hoovering up Confused Ducks and whatever else we come across.Having completed the Flowers series, we turned our attention to the nearby Hold 'em series. A different road, though, meant different conditions, and we struggled to find safe parking spots for the van in busier traffic. We gave up on that strategy, and walked for part of the trail. Still more to find, but we'll complete another time. Generally, the caches were straight-forward to find, but several DNFs where a thorough hunt failed to find. All caches signed, and returned as found. Tftc!This one was found out in the open, about three metres from the hiding spot. I replaced it by the hint object, and put a fist-sized stone on top of it.

Having completed the 'flower' series not to far from here, we thought we might as well grab some of the card series as well. Pulling the campervan over was proving difficult on this road so after collecting a half dozen or so, we opted to park up at Nelson Creek and walk back to try and at least complete the 'diamond' set. Unfortunately we had a lot of dnfsThanks for setting this series up

Came over to do some confused ducky caches, but I left the codes at home. Had to settle for this series. Thanks Gracie7 + Mum.

TFTC - quick find on the trail.

Quick find. TFTC

A caching we will go, Hi ho merry-o a caching we will go. I searched high and low for these and in the main had success.

??

Easy find with Cympull while riding powertrail. TFC

Thanks for your amazing cache. I really appreciate the time you took to set up and maintain your caches.
Found with Fisha1288
Cheers, Cympull.

2706. A quick sprint up the road from the camp on the bikes to grab what we could before the rain came. TFTC!!!

We came out and checked all 56 cards today.All good here. it still like brand new. Happy Caching

Was expecting a dnf for this but cache all good after a replacement by Co...put my hand on the old cache as I stood up not inches from the post in dead grass..have collected and will use to replace any broken ones I come across..tftc

No cache to find here for us today unfortunately so after a short search we moved on to the next one TFTC

Hmm gave this a good look with Juju54 no luck here

Well this was a cracking game of cards...a bit of twisting; a bit of sticking; mostly came up trumps, but I was also dealt a few bad hands.
Many of these logs might be similar, so I will chuck in some interesting(?) facts which I found on the internet...so they must be true
FACT! :

What name did Jacks previously go by?
Knave. As the card abbreviation for knave (Kn) was so close to that of the king, it was very easy to confuse them and therefore changed in 1864.

#3683

I started today by doing this trail. An enjoyable drive up Nelson Creek Rd which kept me out of mischief for a couple of hours. Most were quick finds, but there was the odd DNF along the way as well. TFTC

Tyfc nice easy find with Kerry owl

Great park n grab with blunsdon. Thank you for the cache

Lincoln was very excited to find the old looking bottle. First Geocache find ever.

Out on a maintenance run with the Little Monkeys and we made let stay in the car while we replaced a few wet logbooks and then went to have a play at the park. Out with the wet and in with the dry. All good to go here again and just like brand new. Happy Caching

Cache log is wet. A great day amazing trail what else could you ask for. Tftc stamped the log and placd it back where I found it. Now on the third set it's great views are amazing.

A planned geocaching trip with specific targets in mind.
1: The final 2 caches to fill my D/T grid
2: The last 5 caches available (all in the South Island) to meet the NZ Jasmer challenge GC4R9Z6
3: Get as many caches as possible in a day (Solo)
I had no timetable and only a vague route (Christchurch - Dunedin- Invercargill). So after 20 days of sleeping in my tent/car I arrived home having traveled 4500km and visited some interesting places. Met some great people. I had found over 650 caches. That was a lot of park. Jump out out. Find cache sign and return. Then on to the next. All this done by myself. Also attended an event and had 2 FTF
Mission 1 and 2 were achieved and I had a best day of 153 caches. All this done by myself.
Day 17 Waikari to Greymouth 50 caches found including a FTF.
After collecting the FTF I went for a drive up this valley. I was not able to get all the caches as I was on a limited search time. Thank you for the series.

Out for evening MTB from camp. Tftc

A two day trip over to the Coast with Bitsprayer.
Thanks for the placements, a lot of fun.
erninz

Second day of caching on the west Coast an in Canterbury, and what a great day it was, around 100 cahes I think, Many thanks to all the cache placers. -Bitsprayer

SJT_NZ and I had looked at this power trail at Christmas as we were intending to be in the area but that didn't quite work out so a weekend jolly to the West Coast was in order and given we are doing a bit of a challenge this ticked off one of the criteria. Really enjoyed this trail, all caches had been put together well and some keep you on your toes hides as mentioned, the bonus caches added a little intrigue - will it have a number or not? A lot of fun so thanks to G7&M for the effort of placing, publishing and maintaining. Bumped into a couple of caches that were missing and some minor maintenance administered, 2 DNFs which could be just caching blindness. Thanks for a great few hours, we were lucky enough to stay in the local area and dropped in for a refreshment at the local facility.

Tregearp and I are working on a challenge cache that has a number of aspects - one is at least 30 finds in one day, and another is at least 70 finds in a single month - and no cache may count for two parts of the challenge.


We saw this power trail and a couple of other really interesting caches in the area so decided a weekend away was in order. Found 50 of the 52 caches on the power trail and have most of the details for the four bonus caches - enough to hopefully be able to work out the finals for the two we're missing some detail on.

Generally all in good order, although did perform some maintenance along the way. Will msg the CO separately with details.

Thanks gracie7 + Mum for the trail, and the other caches in the area.

Another beautiful drive along this lonely road finishing up the card series! Saw lots of birds today, although I can't identify any of them. Learned what a Cabbage Tree is and learned what a fluffy post is! Thank you Gracie and Mum for this lovely series! tftc!

Thanks!

Maintenance Run on all the cards today. This one was all good. Happy Caching

Out doing the power with Tufty. He did all the driving and I did all the real work.[^] Thanks for the cache gracie7 +Mum. Sorry for all the cut & pastes.

I was out with my big brother, BaldEd, today picking quite a few caches in the "Know When to Hold'em series plus a couple of extras.

I was doing the driving while he was doing all the signing with me helping occassionally.

Cheers for the cache.

We had to go for this trail... Helped us beating our "best day" "best month" and ">500 geocaches in NZ" challanges
We eventually found 48 out of 52, also got all the bonus caches. Some containers were very wet though, not every logbook was really signable.
Thanks for this powertrail!

Last night, ReCached and I were finally back in Greymouth after spending one month all over the South Island. While we were planning the next day, we noticed this powertrail on the way to Reefton. We love Geocaching and the trail complemented our journey perfectly. All in all, we managed to find 48 out of the 52 geocaches as well as all 4 bonus caches. TFTC gracie7 + Mum!

January 31, 2018 @ 11:13
Cache #2399

Found it and emptied out a bit of water. Log was dry. Five signatures since log replaced, but seven people claim it. I see a trend with the missing names too. Thank you cache owner.

Decided to wake up nice and early today and we drove 10 minutes from Taylorville to try to complete as many of the caches as we can before we have to check out (turns out, there was also the added challenge of our car being rather Low on petrol). We started off at the Hearts suit, but I had forgotten to take down some of the numbers due to my absent-mindedness, so I forfeited on the bonus. There were also a few that I DNFed along the way due to the thickness of the bushes or expedience. Oh well... such is life. Nevertheless, most of the caches were in good condition and the logbooks were signable. TFTC!

Came down this way from the North for the Oamaru Geofest, and decided to add a few more days to the weekend trip and turn it into a bit of a Mega mission, starting 5pm on Wednesday 18th and finishing 3pm Monday 23rd! Teaming up with Cats&Dragons for the first 24 hours then with Iammrwalker joining the team for the remainder.
Just a few of the stats for the trip were:
- 700 caches found, including 270+ puzzles (thanks to the Christchurch Geoart)
- 3300 km's driven, using over 500L of fuel $$$
- Just over 20 hours of sleep (about 4 per day on average), and about 100 hours of caching time.
Certainly a Mega Trip!

Day 2: More Christchurch Geoart was the order of business, with the Eclipse, Smurfs and Geocaching Glossary series the main goal before heading to the airport to pick up Iammrwalker this afternoon and heading over Arthur's Pass for the CANZ West Coast cache and finishing with the "Know when to Hold em" pick up 52 series.

Over on the west coast now, and after a bite to eat it was time to grab a few caches. As our time was running out we thought it would be best to focus on a few caches only in Greymouth before heading to the nearby "know when to hold em'" trail.

On the trail now and having done a few trails now we got into a groove pretty quickly and made real short work of the trail. Mangaged to get through the trads in under 1 1/4 hours, most were very quick finds with only 1 causing a long search. The finals taken about 20 mins to sort out the coords and find the caches. Thanks for the trail, it was a bit of fun racing the clock.

Sorry about the cut and past logs, but that seems to happen with cache runs of this size!

The (major road trip was about to begin) that was for the Oamaru Geofest trip in the company of HKCB and iammrwalker for a bit of a road trip across to the west coast, through Haast and in a roundabout way to Oamaru.

My trip stats were as follows: 617 caches (214 Puzzles), 3300kms, 500 litres of Petrol, 21 hours sleep, 100+hours caching time. THe weather was wonderful and apart from about a 6hour period on the sunday we had fine weather all the way and feel that we made a bit of a hole in the region.

Firstly thanks to all the CO's that put in the effort to to set up these caches and to all the CO's whose caches we did not find this trip, well we are already planning our next trip.
We worked hard at getting specific caches (especially the Geo Art around christchurch and hence our concentration on this area for the preliminary 24 hours. So after a couple of running repairs to the rental vehicle (fuses not working) we were off knowing that all ports could be charged and that sleep was for the weak.

Sorry about the copy and paste logs but that is what tends to happen with a number run of this size.
We managed to complete the run down all the trads in this trail in just on 1 hour with a lot of determination then it was just a matter of locating those pesky bonus caches.
Thank you for the placement, thank you for the cache

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Did you know that planning has started for a Mega Event in Wellington in 2018? Check out the details on the [WENZ Website](https://sites.google.com/site/wenzgeo2018/home) or visit the event's page on [FaceBook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/590545297801072/) and don't forget to log your attendance on the [WENZ Event Page](https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC78NMQ_wenz-event-2018-wellington?guid=23f451a2-08ac-4374-883f-ed6814687147/)

I found this Geocache on a Geocaching mega mission along with Cats&Dragons and HKCB. With only just over three and half thousand Geocache finds I was very much the over achiever in training. We were in the South Island to support the Oamaru Geofest event, hunt down some Jasmar and D/T harder to find Geocaches, lonely caches (those not found in more than 6 months), virtuals and try and meet some milestone numbers. We signed the logs HIC, an abbreviation of our respective Geocaching names, (H)KCB, (I)ammrwalker and (C)ats&dragons. A huge thanks to all the CO’s who placed and maintain the Geocaches we found.

I arrived in Christchurch late Thursday evening having left straight from work and was picked up by my intrepid companions in our four wheel drive rental to find they had already grabbed about 270 finds in the previous twenty four hours. I wonder if the rental company would have still let us have it had they known we would travel 3300km in it before returning it four days later? Our trip took us to Greymouth via Arthurs pass, Ngahere, down the west coast to Haast across to Hawea, Cromwell, Twizel, Aoraki Mt Cook, Tekapo, onto the east coast up to Oamaru and back up to Christchurch via Akaroa and countless diversions and small towns along the way. We slept in the car for the first two nights, grabbing some shut eye between cache finds, taking turns to drive. We rented a small place in Oamaru for the other two nights and appreciated a bed to sleep in and a hot shower. It was an amazing trip, in which I discovered the South Island has some of the most incredible scenery in the world.

This was the only power trail I did during the trip and I appreciated the numbers. We managed to pick up all trads in under an hour and the bonus caches soon after which I thought was an impressive effort. Sorry for the (mostly) generic logs.

Day 2 S.I Sheffield to Greymouth
Drizzling rain most of the day, stopped & picked up some groceries in town before heading out on the card trail.
We are making camp tonight at Nelson Creek campground , finish the cards tomorrow then return to town for another night.
Thanks for placing this cache gracie7 + Mum

another one bites the dust tftc

Travelling from Greymouth to Nelson today so I put aside most of the morning to come and score this cache series. A quick and easy find here. Signed log, TFTC

Mum and I came out for a check of all the cards today. We couldnt find this one. It may have floated off so we added a replacement with a wire attachment so hopefully that wont happen again. Everything all good here now.

We started on this trail a bit later than anticipated so speed was the essence for the last cache finds as we didn't want to be caching in the dark.
Mostly the caches were easy finds though we didn't find 3 of them, I suspect that they have all gone. We appreciated the good hints for speedy finds. Thanks for the hard work setting up and maintaining the series. TFTC.

#14182. We enjoyed the power trail. Thanks for all the hides.

Quick find and an opourtunity to add to the Easter Total. TFTC

Found this one while on a holiday from our home in Whangamata. TFTC

Our South Island trip is mainly about collecting solved puzzles, but this morning we started with a 52 Trad power trail (with 4 bonus puzzles at the end) . An enjoyable drive up Nelson Creek Rd, and mostly quick finds of all the caches. Thanks.

We stayed at the nearby campground nice place! Today we will cycle along the nelson creek road and hopefully find some caches. Tftc Sprunghörnchen

Just about missed this one. TFTC.

Another wet Container and we couldn't see the Trees for the wood!,but had another look and of course there it was.All dry now.TFTH

Out maintaining some cards today. This one was checked and we couldnt find it ourselves so put a replacement in.

One of 25 found along the power trail yesterday. TFTC

Today was the day. I started early in greymouth and the power trail was my main goal to get closer to my 2000th. I did before some quality caches but now it was time to bring up my numbers. I was also able in the end to log three of the four bonus caches. I am on my own on holidays which means I played driver and cacher which took me all together three hours. would have preferred to ride my bike. sometime I didn't feel comfortable how I parked the car but I had so much fun writing down the clues and go to the next and the next cache. enjoyed the whole power trail. Thank you so much for it. not all caches are in good condition but overall was it enough. thanks again.

All good with this cache.

Sorry for the cut and paste logs, But thanks a million for giving me the exercise of getting in and out of the cache mobile so many times. TFTC

Easy find TFTC

One of 42 caches located today, a new personal best. 35 of those were on the Nelson Creek Road “power trail”. This was one of those. Thanks for all the effort put in by the CO in installing and maintaining these. #1273. TFTC.

Found TFTC

Found on Team Walkers whirlwind trip to the West Coast! As a treat to ourselves to celebrate our 10th anniversary we chose to come to the Coast with the ultimate aim being to complete this power trail. Had never done one ... QEF here.

Pleased to see the weather has brightened up here which makes the prospect of completing the 52 pick up today more promising. TFTC #8697

The cows came running over to check out what we were up to tftc

I was fortunate enough to be able to squeeze an 11 day holiday out of two leave days!! I headed out west to find some caches, see some sights, and relax before the madness of the semester hits. The weather was unbelievably good, only a bit of a storm over Arthur's Pass on the first day, otherwise hot and sunny. I found a great variety of caches, drive by's, walks, hikes, even a power trail. Thank you to all the CO's for their great hides!!!
Today was to be a big day, and it started early, too. I was out on the road with the break of dawn, aiming to get a few, and a couple more The main plan was to attack the cards, but I managed to get in a good variety today! A total of 75/76, including some long forgotten ones also. TFTC!!!

Clue threw us of for a moment, but we found it.

Mum and I came back to check all of the cards today after not having enough replacements with us nearly a fortnight ago. All good here - we just added a new bag.. Happy Caching

Yah on our way again

Well what a day, this was on must do list of caches, coming back from greymouth we had to start at the other end on bikes and hubby waited at the half way mark (camp ground) with the camper, just before the bridge kaleb crashed into the back of me, he buckled his front wheel and is covered in scratches but is ok, due to him crashing into the back of my head it was touch and go on if I was going to do the rest, had a rest sucked it up and did it, hubby was in full support and followed at points in the camper.
Got a total of 41, and a big thank you for taking the time and placing these, sorry for the copy and paste did meet a fellow cacher towards the end which has been a first while we have been down here, so had a quick chat before biking the rest of the caches.

Tftc

Enjoying bike riding along these, thanks

When planning our MEGA roadtrip this series caught our eye and it looked to be fast and fun. Headed here in the morning and really enjoyed picking up most but unfortunately not all of the caches in the series. For some reason it seemed we missed one number out of every suit needed for the bonus caches - lucky for us these had helpful Geocheckers ! This is a fun little power trail and very similar to one near Hamilton. Once again gracie7+Mum thanks for all these great caches.

# 5,150

Another great find touring around the South Island while making my way to the Mega. Thanks for adding to the enjoyment of this trip.

SL TFTC and the series

It's the final day of NZDi's and my Blenheim - Christchurch - Greymouth - Blenheim triangular caching trip. The plan for the day was to pick up souvenir pack of cards from the coast, by the Wet Coast weather is living up to its name and if it keeps up like this I think we will be heading straight home. The weather report for the Nelson region looks a bit better with no rain, so I have loaded some caches along that route into my mobile just incase we decide to go that way home. Our logs were annotated Kiwimykl and NZDi, KM & ND or variations there of.

This series was the main focus of todays caching adventure and as the weather was bearable, (some drizzle, some dry and some downpour), we decided to carry on and do it. In this case all our logs were '1/8 KM + ND'.

This is a well thought out and maintained series and apart from the BtG series, is the first power trail I have done. After the first two or three caches we got the general idea of what to look for but it still took us almost four hours to complete. I've heard stories of record breaking times on this, but my driver made sure she parked the geomobile safely and didn't know how to work the c:geo app so couldn't set up for the next cache while I logged the present one. And then there were the ones that were a little more difficult to find (Ivy) or that had been removed from their hides by wild life or others (1 found a couple of metres into the paddock protected by an electric fence and a couple dislodged from their hide and hiding elsewhere), and towards the end there were two missing completely, (Queen and Ace of Diamonds). In the end we got the lot, except for the bonuses after replacing the missing two with temporary logs from our now depleted log repair kit.

TFTC G&M

Found with Kiwimykl, refer to his log for details.

TFTC

[purple] We came out to check all the cards today. All good here

Drove over from Christchurch yesterday, staying in Greymouth for a couple of nights. Today I got up to Ikamatua along the state highway, then the return trip via the back roads on the other side of the river, caching all the way. I heard recently that when you shuffle a deck of cards, the chances that anyone has ever shuffled and got the same order in the history of the world is so ridiculously small, it is fair to assume that it has never happened. www.qi.com has some other cool facts about how unlikely it is. But that got me thinking, someone could be up this road for the rest of their life and still never get anywhere near being able to find these caches in all the different permutations TFTC (2164)

A plan was hatched during the week for a raid on the West Coast on some of the various caches placed over this way. In scope were the pack of cards power trail (gracie7 = mum), some Greymouth ones in town, a Wherigo, Earthcache, missing D/T combo at Blackball, some pre solved puzzle caches and anything else that took our eye on the way past. Setting off with co pilot the seagnoid (I drive, he directs) we left Blenheim at 0600 (should have left at 0500 because we were driving some of it in daylight, and not caching, a waste of daylight!) All up another epic day; just under a hundred finds, 3 or 4 F T Fs, over 700 kms on the speedo, 15 hours driving and some new scenery seen (should that be saw-ery). We saw Wekas (well I did anyway, t S saw a goat on a goat house and lots of coal, but then what do you expect!) The weather was kind, the sun shone a bit and the temp hit 18 degrees at one point, thanks West Coast,
Thanks to all the C Os whose caches we found today, some logs were signed C T S to save some log book space, others a scrawl and the date 2/5.
Time to get on with this powertrail along a nice quiet back road. All caches were in good condition except one missing cache which we replaced as it has had a few D N Fs. Got most of the numbers required, except Hearts, we were missing a few despite a revisit and Diamonds which we got wrong somewhere maybe. Only took about an hour and a half, the team worked well (mostly)
T F T C for this series gracie7 + mum

[green] An awesome day trip with Capperz. FTFs, earthcache, wherigo, a cache deep in a mine, an F T F on a cache yet to be published and a 52 cache power trail. 98 caches in all, we were caching in the dark and too tired to bother with trying to get to 100 (and I have done 100 in a day before). But it also involved a 3.5 hour drive from Blenheim to Greymouth, and another 3.5 hour drive back. Plus weka and goats (I'm claiming the goat, but alas, can only claim one weka. Capperz trumps me easily with a full house: three weka and a couple of weka). And rats and possums...

Logged as CTS 2.5. - Capperz & the Seagnoid 2/5/15
Love this series. Managed to find them all, although not all of the codes [?] Will give it a couple of favourites though.

This entry was edited by the Seagnoid on Sunday, 03 May 2015 at 03:49:26 UTC.

Easy find, thanks for cache - Signed: Chris/stu CBZ

Found it. Logged in book as Chris / Stu (CBZ)

6862. When preparing for our geocaching trip to the Coast we saw this trail and, having done one the same in the Waikato, we decided to put it on our 'must do list'. This was the last opportunity today and the forecast was fine after yesterday's atrocious weather, so off we went. Started at the bottom and did them in order. One DNF (possibly missing) and fifty five finds, including the four bonus caches. Did the whole lot in three hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. Most of the hiding places were obvious, the hints were clear and the GPS behaved almost perfectly. Headed back into Greymouth for a celebration lunch (also our 47th wedding anniversary). Thanks for an excellent, well prepared series. Rodney and Iris. Sorry about all the cut and paste but 56 finds altogether for the day necessitated this.

Out on an Easter Cache hunt where it was all about the numbers. Headed for this trail on day 1.
Nice trail. Thanks for the effort in placing it and maintaining it.
TFTC

On an epic caching mission with Shannonp1 through Reefton to Greymouth over the Lewis Pass, cacheing in Greymouth then returning to Rangiora via Arthurs Pass over two days. Final count for the weekend was over 200 caches. This is a superbly placed and maintained trail. The spots are generally easy parked and accessible. Will add a favourite to the start and finish of each suit and the finals for each suit. A quick easy find on our way past.

On an epic caching mission with Surveybase to North canterbury, Waipara, Culverdon, Springs Junction, Reefton, Greymouth, Arthurs Pass and back to Rangiora over two days. Final count for the weekend was Saturday 124 caches, Sunday 80 caches. not a bad weekends work. sorry for the cut and paste but it would take forever to log them all.

TFTC!! Found whilst enjoying Keith's 40th camping weekend!!

All good here today.

Side trip on our way back to ChCh but we did not find 3 Hearts, King Hearts, 10 Diamonds, Queen Diamonds, 5,6,7 Clubs.

Continuing with this series. All good with this cache.

This entry was edited by Sevren on Sunday, 08 February 2015 at 21:52:25 UTC.

#5036
Decided to attack the "Know When to Hold 'Em" PT on Nelson Creek Road from the wrong end so I had the caches on the drivers side of the car. That means you will see a copy and paste entry for 46 caches and 6 DNF logs. It's a shame about them as it meant that I didn't even attempt the mystery caches.

Funnily enough I was talking to the neighbour of my friends in Chch and they had been a rural postman on the Nelson Creek Road and knew all about the series. Even funnier was the first car that passed me. It was the Rural Postman and I got a big wave!

TFTC

Check my blog at [green]ds8300[/green]

So glad I'm with my buddy. Aiming for two thousand finds. Caching is more fun with a pal

Card playing all the way. Yeehaa. Cheers for the trail.

Quick find

Count n dwn found

Good series. Did about half. will do the other half next time thanks

And so to the first of the 2-eyed Jacks. No problem finding this one, maybe it was the way the light was shining but I could see it from some distance as I approached. TFTC .

First time I've done a power trail with a driver (Mrs Nofs obliged). Definitely makes a difference, completed the lot in about 1.5 hours - minus the three DNFs. 3H, QD, AC. Thanks for the series.

Found with Moneydork TFTC

An nice series that we did on a brilliant sunny West Coast day.
I did these with Hello Mrs, logging some as "Hello Dork" in order to combine both our cache names.
We had a few DNFs whuich we will log seperately in due course) but had a great time all the same. TFTC.

TFTC

Found on a overcast day in the area

Quick find tftc

Tftc