Join Me, Murphy and Charlie from the Nine to Alive team as we went to find Geocaching around the city.

I’m going to be honest I’m a complete muggle.

A few weeks ago, I’d never heard of Geocaching and the community on the app that makes it so special.

Charlie had also never done it before but Murphy has had the Geocaching app sitting comfortably on his phone for years, so worst case scenario, he was able to bail us out.

On Friday morning, we downloaded the app and headed up to the Sandygate, the world’s oldest football ground and home of Hallam FC and scouted the Geocaches of Crosspool, Sheffield.

Crosspool Geocache One: Watt Lane

Up first to break me and Charlie in was the easy and small ranked Geocache. ‘Crosspool Geocache One’. We read the welcoming description to the Crosspool Geocache series and got searching.

Now, I can’t tell you exactly where we found the Cache as that would ruin the challenge but it was easier than we expected.

After, just a few minutes we were writing our names and Nine to Alive to commemorate mine and Charlie’s first cache, which Murphy being the resident Geocacher found as soon as we got within a few metres.

Crosspool Geocache Nine

Up next, the aptly named Crosspool Geocache Nine. Again, Murphy found it straight away, but for me and Charlie, this micro Geocache meant breaking our forbidden rule. Looking at the app’s hint.

The hint read ‘Road Sign’ which we had frustratingly spent around five minutes inspecting.

More annoyingly, for Charlie he had, had his hand on it and didn’t realise.

Charlie says: “I don’t know how I didn’t see it. I had my hand on it!

“But it was a good lesson for the next cache to use more than just your eyes.”

Crosspool Geocache Six

The next cache was Crosspool Geocache Six. Another 1.5 difficulty micro, with a checkpoint across from the car park where we started our adventure.

Having begrudgingly crossed the hint line, it was an embarrassingly short time before we again clicked it for this cache.

It read ‘Sometimes, when caching, you have to use your hands, not your eyes…’

This one took the longest as there were more places it could have been. After checking high and low and Charlie had met more woodworms than anyone should ever have to. We found it.

When I say we found it, we definitely, under no circumstances had Murphy’s help, who may or may not have found it within thirty seconds of looking.

Murphy says: “I just got down looked up and there it was. These two tried their best but honestly, while they tried, they are probably still muggles.”

You can hear the first three attempts on our weekly podcast, but we decided to drive a little more out of the city to film a YouTube exclusive cache.

Mr Jiggs Pennine View

Our final cache was Mr Jiggs Pennine View and it’s safe to say the view didn’t disappoint.

This one was labelled as a small difficulty 2.0 geocache and while it took us a few minutes of looking around trees and through the long grass. Most of the difficulty was likely due to the ‘off the beaten track’ nature of this one.

Along with the paper this time, we were joined by a new friend, a little slug in the geocache.

With, Nine to Alive stamped on the final geocache of the day we headed back to the office with a sense of fulfilment only such an exploration can provide.

I personally will never look at the city streets the same way after Geocaching always wondering what geocache might be around the corner.

Check out our we went Bushcrafting article.