Braeside Park offers a variety of educational and recreational opportunities. It protects significant environmental and cultural heritage, from Aboriginal occupation to European settlement. You can stroll through the park’s Red Gum grassy woodlands, heathland and around the wetlands, which provide a series of diverse, complex and valuable environmental communities. *
Cache In Trash Out® (CITO) is an environmental initiative supported by the geocaching community. Since 2002, CITO has helped preserve the natural beauty of cache-friendly spaces. At CITO events, geocachers and community groups work together to improve parks and other outdoor environments. They clean up litter, plant trees, remove invasive species, build trails, and more. Twice per year, geocachers can earn virtual souvenirs by hosting and attending events during CITO weeks. **
Geocaching Victoria, in conjunction with Parks Victoria, has organized a CITO to help them clean up the very popular Braeside Park. Braeside Park is not only a popular park with the wider community, but it has also been immensely popular with the geocaching community over the years. The first geocache to be placed in Braeside Park was GCGNME, Rumpletweezer, in November 2003. The popular nigh multi cache GC2FTNV, Home of HöpsHöps the roo used to explore the park at night time. Today the park still plays host to a Caches of Ice and Fire cache (GC65HPM) as well as a Trackable Wormhole which leads to the USA (GC4TFY4) and also the very popular Stumped in Braeside (GC45VFN) with 65 favourite points!
Recently Geocaching Victoria and Parks Victoria have formed a partnership to help Parks Victoria clean up different parks around the state and by mutual agreement; we both thought that Braeside Park would be a fantastic place to start. So on the morning of the 28th of April, 2018 Geocaching Victoria and Parks Victoria are running a CITO event to help clean up Braeside Park, and Geocaching HQ is coming to the party as well because everyone who attends a CITO on that day is awarded a special souvenir!
The CITO event will run between 9am and 1pm and you can turn up at the posted co-ordinates during this time to sign the log book to claim your CITO smiley. Geocaching Victoria will put on a BBQ breakfast of bacon and eggs from 9am until 10am. At 10am there will be a safety briefing by a Parks Victoria Ranger. As we said, you can turn up anytime between 9am and 1pm to claim your CITO smiley, however, it must be understood, that to actively undertake any of the cleanup work in the park on the day, you MUST be in attendance at 10am to listen to the briefing from the ranger at the posted co-ordinates and sign your attendance on the form provided by Parks Victoria.
Some of the tasks that Parks Vic would like us to attempt include...
- Litter pick up.
- Mulch spreading.
- Tree Guard and tree guard game reclaimation – recycling
- Painting of Park Signs and staining of tree art pieces.
- Trail Maintenance.
Parks Victoria and Geocaching Victoria will provide all the necessary tools that are required for this work
Volunteers are responsible to:
- Work in a safe manner and to be mindful of the safety of other volunteers and park visitors.
- Ensure that they are physically able to participate in the activity.
- Refrain from activities that may impact on a pre-existing medical or physical condition.
- Register their attendance on the form provided by Parks Victoria.
Parks Victoria recommends that volunteers bring the following items to the activity:
- Sufficient drinking water and food
- A broad-brimmed hat and sunscreen
- Suitable clothing for the activity/weather
- Solid, enclosed footwear
- Work or gardening gloves
- Eye protection
- Insect repellent
- Mobile phone for communications
- Personal First Aid Kit
So that’s about it. Geocaching Victoria and Parks Victoria look forward to our first event together and hope to be able to hold many more like it in the future.