Gold Blaxlands Ridge, New South Wales, Australia
By teamMerlin on 13-Mar-17. Waypoint GC722EZ

OCW with Everest High, Brewmaker and ItsDozzie. Today was a day for staying on dry land. It was a beautiful day for caching - just a light breeze and warm, but not discomfortingly hot. Another find in this amazing series. Thanks, team Merlin.

found in company. TFTC

Nice easy walk in the bush to GZ. Shame about all the rubbush in the bush. TFTC

Ltf

#8364Its finally time! The long awaited HAVOC Colo Kayaking Trip!After the event this morning, at 8am sharp the kayaks were on the water and we were off. A beautiful day for a paddle, and a nice series of caches and DTs!Permission to replace missing ones granted by the COs, and all logs being signed as HSC24 (Hunter Sydney Canberra 24) end of copy paste Finished the paddling early and still have plenty of time, so some caching is certainly in order for a little while.Grabbed this one with GeoIan, MadRabbitoh, Mighty Minions and Deni_f.Had this solved for ages, would love to continue down this firetrail but time is working against us today. Last one for the day! TNLN SLThanks for placing and maintaining this cache teamMerlin

Found on a day out this way, doing some of the Yin Yang series, challenge caches and whatever else came our way. OCW with 4Rods, EverestHigh and Its_Dozzie, we managed to survive the heat, the hills, the bush and deafening cicadas. A few goannas were spotted as well, and we enjoyed the scenery in the many places we visited.We struck gold and found this one without too much trouble. TFTC

Struck gold very quickly at GZ. OCW Its_Dozzie. ?? TFTC teamMerlin

#8364After kayaking the Colo River for 6 hours we had spare time before an evening event at Wiseman's Ferry, so dropped trailers at camp and cached on.We parked at the fire-trail start, maybe driveable but we had little time, and walking probably faster than turning around 3 vehicles....I spotted GZ, but my GPSr was pointing at another 'GZ' that looked pretty inviting too. GeoIan nailed the cache at the first one - my GPS reported 15m at GZ??TFTC!

Find#3023The HAVOC geocachers are coming to Colo to complete an event and then a paddle. I was up at 430am to drive down the Putty road to attend. Once we had completed the paddle and taken a breather Team737, Mighty Minions, GeoIan, Madrabbitohs and myself came to claim a few of the puzzles that we had solved in this series. TFTC teamMerlin

Stuck gold, eureka ! Woah, have a big lizard for the cache guardian why dont you. See the picture. Found him at ground level and he just scooted up the tree in no time

Our epic kayak on the colo river finished earlier than we thought it would, so after a rest we decided to head out and find some caches, I have had this puzzle solved for a while but had to wait until I was in the area to grab it and then it was a quick find at GZ. Thanks for the cache teamMerlin tnln replaced as found sl

Nice cache. Puzzle took some pondering. TFTC

#9785 15:10
Today was a road trip around the Hawkesbury area. An ambitious list of caches to find as I set myself a target of reaching 10,000 finds by year end. Covid-19 lockdown put a spanner in the works and I now have only two months to find the remaining 200+ caches. So rather than interesting caches, I had to schedule a day in the car and go for quantity, rather than quality.

One of the few Yin-Yan puzzles I managed to solve. Finally with lock-down lifted I could get to this cache on my little roadtrip.

This is 42 of 61 finds today. TFTC!

We've been working through many geocaching puzzles over the last 2 years and are slowly improving. This puzzle was straightforward for us, fortunately. So we were happy. The cache was in a nice hiding hole. TFTC teamMerlin

#6760 (7 of 11 today)

At a recent puzzle solving event I sat down with two like minded cachers and looked at one of the puzzles in this series. Even though I still had a number of solutions for the series in the bag, I hadn't looked at any of them for a little while.
While we didn't complete the solution - it was either stop part way of succumb to strabismus, or maybe astigmatism (are they a caches in this series?) - we were 90% of the way there.

Reinvigorated, I sat down with more caches in the series the next day. And a bit of the day after that. And the result was some more solutions - at least one which was so quick a solve I really wondered why I hadn't done it long ago.

So today, wanting to up my calendar day count (only have ten), I decided I'd grab some. Went for eleven - and found them all, including the one we'd solved at the event.

Undoubtedly I will have to revisit areas I plundered today - there are plenty of solves still to go in this series, and I've already revisited one or two trails.
However, it seems my two co-conspirators are of like mind, so we will likely be putting our collective heads together to crack some of the remaining puzzles.

Nice day for caching in the bush too - not too windy, not too hot.
###END OF CUT AND PASTE SECTION###
Puzzle rang a bell so didn't take too long before I had a way in.

At GZ I arrived to find a car suspiciously parked, and the owner keen to stay out of view. I suspect that their parking at a dump site may not have been coincidence.

Fortunately the cache was out of their view, so I made the grab, signed, replaced and circled around to stay out of sight.

SLTNLN
TFTC

An easy find after the now regular event of beating head against wall in frustration of Merlin's puzzle... I wonder why I submit myself to such grief at times. Left a pathtag or two. Tftfhc teamMerlin.

hmmm i have managed to leave a small bag of items above the cache, nothing critical, I will try to get there in a day or two to retrieve it. ALL GOOD!! i got them!

Found this as one of 25 found today. Had never dealt with this kind of thing before, but found it quite fun.

The hide was relatively straightforward (Sadly there was a lot of dumping nearby again).

Enjoyed the lesson. TFTC.

It's been a while, but i finally managed to get back to this area to find the rest of this series. While not as hot as the last time he, the sun still baked me on my trek.
Thanks for the cache.

I've heard some people call geocaching littering - spreading containers throughout the bush. Well perhaps they should visit this one, and see that bogans do a much more effective job without the hobby.

A team of three novos out in the YY bush today to find as many of our ~15 (latest) solved puzzles from the series as we could. I'd got onto solving a number of the intermediate D ones back when they were first published but I don't get the chance to come out to this neck of the woods much with at least a day's worth of finds now available. I recall that this puzzle was interesting on first inspection. I'd never seen "that" before and it took a little reading up to work it out. Wow. I've since come across it in a lost wanderers puzzle (I think it was).

This was the first of a group of three involving a medium walk. Near GZ and we were again greeted and saddened by a disgusting mess dumped nearby, this time by what looks like an air-conditioning contractor. Passing through it, a black hose almost made me jump as it looked for a second like a red belly black in the corner of my eye. The cache was located by youngest geokid again which was starting to annoy eldest just a little. I assured him though that so long as his name is in the log, it wouldn't matter too much. Cache replaced as found once some TBs were visited. TFTC, teamMerlin. This our 7th YY find of the day.
#842

On our way back down south as our holiday comes to an end, we headed to the Yin Yang series to pick up as many caches that time and weather would permit.
With many hours spent solving these mysteries, a little nudge or 2 from the CO was needed to get us over the finish line for a couple. We found the themed puzzles to be extremely clever as they flowed together giving us the coordinates needed today to make a few finds. Unfortunately we weren't able to pick them all up as the daylight started to fade and we still needed to be on the other side of Sydney, so we had to move on We will be back in NSW next year so we certainly will make our way back here to finish the series and enjoy the area once more [^]
'there's gold in them thar hills'
Enough of high Terrain caches, now its time for both us to get some of the easier hides together.
Thanks teamMerlin for all the hard work put into this brilliant series , testing our mental and physical abilities, we loved the views that the caches took us to

Found on the return journey from the Long weekend of camping.

Found on the way home from a weekend camping trip. SL #3731 on streak day #2279 TFTC

Found on the way home from camping with Ris768, contactpete, spy79, cry05, unicornprincess418, chezh_it_out, Thanks TeamMerlin for placing this cache

Log 1594 Streak Day 639

Reperio at 1555. Found in the company of the garbageman.

With the weekend off, the garbageman and I were keen for a day of caching, so we headed back to this area for some more yin yang fun. With so many hours spent looking at these puzzles, it was finally nice to be able to put them on the found list.

This was the last of the caches to find along this part of the trail, and unbelievably I didn’t have the final coords plotter in on the GPS. Arrgh! Fortunately TG roughly remembered where it was, and so with his rough directions, I headed off into the bush, and managed to locate the cache after a few minutes of searching. Phew!

Gratias teamMerlin.

In the Richmond area today to pick up ten caches. Signed and replaced. Cache all good. Tftc

On a nice stroll with LoyLou0212 today, we picked up some of the caches in this series. Thanks for the puzzles (some trickier than others!), hides and locations (some easier than others), they were all great!

Out and about caching with BeckNmonts this week, this series has had some amazing views and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to find all of these - thanks for putting out this fantastic series - TFTC teamMerlin, I really enjoyed it!

The yin yang series has been on our radar for too long. After finishing up work for the week, we made the trip down for the weekend. Over 2 days we travelled around the different trails, finding all these caches. Thanks for the effort put into this series, it's been fun.

Nice refresher puzzle.

Dirty humans. Very few things make me angrier then people who disrespect our bushland. Quick find from a different hiding methods to most of the others that I had found in the area. Tftc tnln

An enormous day out with the whole gang - M95, GD__, B7, 154C, MCMD.
Admittedly I did not and could not solve most of these puzzles. I was tagging along for the drive and physical manpower. Thanks For The Caches!

After alot of endless nights working on the puzzle series we had ourselves the coordinates needed to make a start on the series we now just needed to find a weekend the gang could all get together.muppet called out again late last week,this weekend suited us all so the plans were soon made to meet for a very early start.We cached all day and well into the night finding all the target hides,a good balance of terrain and difficulty provided perfect harmony.
Another really enjoyable day out caching with good friends.
Thanks teamMerlin for all the hard work you've put in setting up this series.

Apologies for the repeated logs
TFTC

Admittedly I had only worked part of the way through these puzzles but when I got the call to participate in some trail walking and bush bashing I was packed up and ready to go in nothing flat. Bit of a drive to get here from Wollongong via the Southern Highlands but the day was well worth the effort. I'm glad to have earned some hidden creature souvenirs while getting some great geo-art. Thanks for the caches and the series.

We've been working on this series on and off since they first appeared last year. Today we set our sights on a power-binge to snag them all in a single day... only to discover many of them were just as challenging to get as they were to solve. No matter, though, because we attacked them like a well-oiled machine and plowed through the lot with precision and determination. The weather was on our side and it was a perfect day to accomplish our goal: we were out before sun-rise, rendezvoused with the usual suspects, made the trip from the Southern Highlands, made the first find by nine, the last by seven, and scored two bonus caches in the process; then we had a bite to eat where we could reflect on the day's adventures before refueling and heading for home. All up, a challenging series of puzzles, definitely a challenging day out, and some great art on our map. Thanks Team Merlin for the caches and the series.

What an adventure it has been to get here…

This all started back in August 2017 when I was notified of the puzzle series. I was really on top of puzzle solving skills at the time, so I set to work on the GeoArt. The puzzling process reflected the Yin Yang philosophy – a balance of easy, hard and everything in between. By February, I only had 8 puzzles to go. A few emails between the CO and other puzzle solvers had set the last 8 straight. We have sat on the completed list for 5 months, waiting patiently for the stars to align.

Now that I am on session break, my time has been significantly freed up. It was by chance that I had a weekend day off work, which was an ideal day for the others. A few messages were sent around late in the week to see if everyone was interested in finally getting around to doing the Yin Yang series. We had enough interest to go ahead with the plan.

Rise at 5am. Rendezvous at 7am. Arrive at 9am. Cache until 7:30pm. Return by 9:30pm. Home by 11pm. We managed to find all 59 caches in the Yin Yang series in 10.5 hours. Just like the puzzle solving, the cache finding reflected the Yin Yang philosophy – some caches being effortless, extremely challenging and everything in between.


An absolutely mad achievement! We wanted to smash out the series in a day to appreciate the whole series in its entirety. A momentous day spent in great company! Thanks to teamMerlin for this wonderful series – a lot of time and energy has been put into developing such a cohesive and interconnected set of Mystery caches.

While typing this log I found this great quote I thought I’d tack on:
“Yin and yang, male and female, strong and weak, rigid and tender, heaven and earth, light and darkness, thunder and lightning, cold and warmth, good and evil...the interplay of opposite principles constitutes the universe.” – Confucius

Apologies for generic copy/paste logs. There weren’t many cache-specific field notes that we needed to record. We were just really impressed with completing the series as a whole and overlooked potential points of interest.

**## Found Cache No. 2282 ##
(Caches Found Today: 1 OF 1)
Streak Day: 830 **

After solving this some time ago. Snoopy1976 and I came for a drive up here today for out daily find. TFTC

Streak Day #1719 - Back out this way for our daily cache and was a quick one. TFTC

We've been chipping away at this series for a while now, resulting in several visits to the area in search of the caches that we've solved. This extremely diverse series has since become highly addictive, and over the last few months, countless hours of frustration, puzzle solving, and eureka moments have consumed so much of our time. This weekend we decided it was time to raid the area of Yin Yang caches! 
A familiar looking puzzle that didn't take long to solve. TFTC!
Cheers, 
The Hancock Clan

Gold, our cache #5 today.
At the first look I didn't have a clue what it was about but was lucky with some quick search. Thanks!

Decided it was time to change a few of these question marks into smiley faces for some of the solved puzzles. We thought it would be best to pick up some that were fairly close together and close to the road, due to the wet bush conditions. All were found without difficulty, each log was written on and they were then put back into their hiding places to keep them secure. Thank you teamMerlin for the learning curve with so many of the puzzles in this series.

Day two for our grab on more of these great caches in this picturesque area. We managed to find all of the puzzles that we had solved and some of the other traditionals along the way.

The terrain ranged from nail biting cliff scrambles to easy flat walks that just varied in length. All of the hides were well tucked away and sometimes presented us with a challenging search. Some of the locations played havoc with the GPS and we found ourselves using the 'Where would we hide it' technique which also served us well.

We had a good solid day and certainly feel a bit stiff and sore but with a huge sense of achievement. Thanks again for the obvious effort injected into these interesting and challenging puzzles and for showing us a large portion of your backyard. We enjoy geocaching here and will return again for sure.
SL TFTC

When I first had a look at this puzzle, I recognised what it was, but didn't get around to figuring out how the system worked. Then, in a bit of a puzzling frenzy about two months ago I sat down and had a closer look. It didn't take too long to work with the material and get some numbers that looked promising. I was relieved that the checker also agreed with my findings.

So, with a list of about seven solved but yet to find puzzles in this yin/yang series I tried to pick up a few after our lunch down near the Hawkesbury River area. I had to call it a day on Decoy because I need to rethink my approach with that high T-rating. Fortunately, this one was a quick stroll from where I had parked. Pity about the trash people seem to dump in this beautiful bushland.

I had the caching in hand pretty quickly; added my signature small wire dog to the container and my name to the list of finders. Then on to another nearby hide.

More PHL Program assistance here. Nice and easy find as I was fading fast in the early afternoon. TFTC

Managed to solve this puzzle at home with the help from google. Parked at the suggested area and then walked down the track to find the cache. The cache was found quickly and easily once at GZ. The log was signed and the cache was replaced as found. Now off to the next cache. Thank you teamMerlin for placing this cache.

In town today in search of 25 different D:T combos, in the excellent company of my geokids (3 and 5) and the Mighty Minions. A wonderful day - filled with great family moments, about 8km of walking (the last kilometre by torchlight in complete darkness), some very cheeky hides, and most importantly, NOT A SINGLE DNF! Thanks to all the COs in the region - the coords today were consistently very good, and the caches and logs were by and large in great condition.

This was the nineteenth cache of the day and by now the kids were getting preety tired. They had numerous kilometres of walking under their belt, and more didn't help. HAHA Even if this was 'short'. My 3 year old fell flat on her face on the fire trail here. Not a happy camper. Again she ended up on my shoulders. We will definitely come back and do the rest of these puzzles at some point. What fun they are (mostly - there's some beasts in there). A quick find at GZ. TNLN TFTC

Out on a Sackville puzzle blitz this afternoon. Very much enjoying this series.
All the puzzles are interesting and nice to explore this area.
SL TFTC

I came for a drive to collect some puzzles I had solved over the last couple of weeks and to full in time before catching up with family.

After fiddling with my solution to the puzzle I noticed a problem and a solution which was soon helped by the owner. But it has taken me weeks to find time to come down and make the easy find not too far into the scrub.

TFTC.

The pattern was familiar but initial muddling with the numbers required a small nudge to get the correct numbers.
Drove as far as possible, sad that the area has been used the way it has, surrounding bush deserves better.

Thanks for the puzzle and hide, looking forward to putting it all together.

Found with WaywardWoman. 3rd cache for the day. Disappointed to see lots of dumped rubbish on the track on the way to GZ. Cache was found and log signed and returned. TFTC

#4166- This method of co-ordinate calculation had me searching the Internet for help in terms of what to do. Whilst we found the initial part, what to do from there had both thomo31 and I stumped. Eventually, we both thomo's geohubby and I had a light bulb moment and some co-ords that made sense.
The cache itself was easy enough. Thanks

Feels good solving this and finding it. Thanks for teaching us different kinds of puzzles! Sucks that people turned it in to a tip, though ...

Great puzzle! Had to trust our geosenses for this one, the hint helped a lot shame about all the dumped rubbish on the way to GZ

The GPSr was swinging around a bit at GZ, so I investigated a number of locations that matched the hint, and finally found the cache. Very glad to have such a detailed description of the cache location on occasions like this.
Solving the puzzle was not too tricky, as I've come across this puzzle type thrice, once in Victorian and twice in the ACT.
Thx TM!

#1127 solved the puzzle at a Conundrums event wirking by myself then put the answers away with my other solved caches for the area. Parked at the stated car park then headed in. The sun had already set but I followed tge GPSr to about 5 metres when decided the spot I want to check first. Glad I didn't need the torch as I found the cache.
Signed the log and replaced as found. Thanks for the puzzle teamMerlin. Both the cache & log are in good order.

The following TBs visited for the distance - 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, & 2016 phlphotos NSW geocoins, phlphotos' Spindoc Bob Memorial Geocoin & Rainbow Spirit’s Caching Dilemma's Geocoin,Help for Heroes Geocoin, Heart Strings, Matsi's First Geocoin, Jasmer Geocoin & Kitac 2

After the CITO and Event we headed out to get a few new local caches. We had most of the current series solved and picked up a few hints to finish off the remainder from the earlier events. A bit of googling and some more calcs and we had want we needed. Some nice walks on trails and some bush bashing for others plus some almost drive bys TFTC. Interesting to see the Art work proceeding

#4,937

I tried to figure out the maths here to solve this one myself. Luckily Canary did an intervention and told me there were calculators available. That made it a bit easier!

We parked on the other side of the track for a quick walk to his one. Pity about the rubbish dumping nearby, but once past that, this is a nice area.

Neither of our GPSs would settle here, but kept jumping around all over the place. So we followed the hint. Unfortunately he hint misdirected us slightly (the CO has now updated this), but eventually I looked in the right direction and spotted the container.

Thanks

This was the second of three new teamMerlin puzzle caches we did out here today before heading to the event at the winery. We headed through a short unsavoury piece of bush (those who find the cache will realise what I mean) and then found the search area not far beyond. The GPS was jumping around a little, but the hint said to look for a cairn at the base of a tree, so that's what we did. We must have spent about five minutes looking around a fairly large search area, going from one tree to another, checking what we thought were the most obvious trees and then those less obvious, but we couldn't see a cairn.

Eventually, Toriaz found the cache in what seemed like an obvious enough spot, but it wasn't a cairn. Later at the event, we spoke to teamMerlin who realised he'd mistakenly copied the hint from another cache, so the misleading hint is now gone. Anyway, we found it in the end, and were then off to find another cache in the area which actually was hidden by the cairn in question. Thanks

My first attempt at solving didn't get the green light from the checker so I went over my notes and found the errors I had made. A second checker gave me a green light.

Left home with the log still showing as unclaimed however at GZ I found I was not the first to sign the log. Left my mark and replaced as found. tftc

#1239
Thought I would go for a longer drive and check out this area with lots of new puzzle caches. My original calculations didn't make much sense and I feared some evil trick was required. But then saw that the image was corrected soon after and the checker gave me green. Thought I might be in the running for first to find but someone else made a midnight dash and is probably still sleeping it off

Still nice to sign as STF. I'm really enjoying these puzzles!

TFTC teamMerlin

Published

[*FTF*] Solved all three of this series early on yesterday but had a business dinner to attend and no possibility finding them. So after the dinner finished at 11.30 PM I was surprised that two remained unfound. Decision time am I crazy enough to travel the 45 Km (as the crow flies) to the GZ to claim a FTF
YES I am crazy. Off I set stopping at a service station on Windsor road to buy a torch to guide on my way. Light rain began fall I cursed my luck but continued on in the hope that it will clear up. Parking near GZ I stumbled into the bush with feeble $10 torch illuminating the way. Fortunately the rain had stop and the cache was soon located . A sigh of relief a empty log my efforts were not in vain. Sign the log at 1.00 AM
I must apologize for not log this find sooner and giving futile hope to other hounds. I blame tiredness and a busy day today. TFTC on to the next target Mercury