Northern Territory

NT Geocaching

Please visit the The NT Dashboard to find any new caches in the area and/or geocaching events.

Northern Territory

As of April 2014, there were around 935 active caches in the Northern Territory, mostly around the major regional centers but also in the more remote parks and spread out along the highways. The highest concentration of caches is in the Darwin / Palmerston area, then the Alice Springs area. Katherine also has a sizable number of caches as well. For those who hate nanos and micros, about half of these caches fit into that category.

Caching in the Top End

Geocaching in the Top End presents a number of challenges brought on by the climate and environment.

The climate is extreme with a distinct dry and wet season. Dec-Feb may find you wandering through torrential rain to try and find a cache. Actually, for the most part the rain storms that we have don't tend to last too long and pass relatively quickly. You don't have drizzle hanging around all day like down South. The exception to this is if a monsoon trough sets in, then you can have prolonged rain periods.

At this time of year many of the rural dirt roads become undriveable (and some of the highways can be closed as well). With the copious amounts of rain and high humidity levels, it is also like someone has thrown a bunch of magic beanstalk type seeds all around; The vegetation becomes lush a green and takes off. By the end of the wet season you will find that most of the bushland has 2m plus tall grass growing in it.

A lot of this growth will dry out and die of in the dry season. This leads to another common sight up here in the dry season; fires. It can be difficult to place a cache in the bush in the Top End as you can almost guarantee that a fire will go through the area at some point within the next few years at least once.

These extremes in climate produce the challenges to finding a cache here. Someone may have been driving along a hwy at the end of the dry season and spotted a fantastic rock formation that is just begging for a cache about 75m from the road. They walk out over the 5cm high burnt off stubs of grass and place the cache in the obvious spot and go off happy with there placement. You could then go to look for the cache at the end of the wet season and find that when you get to the closest point to the cache on the road, all you see is a thick wall of 2m long spear grass that is sopping wet and standing in ankle deep water. You won't even be able to see the rock formation. All fun and games and just needs you to pick your times well.

Now to the good stuff, geocaches : )

One look a the map of Darwin will show you that there is quite a high density of caches around town. It is quite easy to combine geocaching and being a tourist as all touristy areas have geocaches, including National Parks. You can just go to any touristy place and look for nearest cache and you are sure to find one nearby.

If you want some numbers and enjoy a stroll through the scrub, head out to the hospital and check out the CCR power trail.

If you like quality caches, do a search for caches in the NT, then rank them by favourite points and some teams will stand out.

Caching in the Red Centre

Watch this space