Latest Race Updates
Participating Geopals (Portal Trackers):
PI0663Team LinusMileage:
566627km+As of 2025-06-21
PI0664Team GustovMileage:
471260km+As of 2025-06-21
PINUL0Species NULLMileage:
427969km+As of 2025-06-21
Golden Horseshoe Area Geocachers Annual Geopal Race
On Sept 14th 2024, GHAGAFAP (
GCANY21) takes places in Rockwood Conservation Area, Ontario. This annual weekend event is self-proclaimed as the longest running annual Canadian geocaching event
(outside pandemic years), with 2024 as its 21st year!
GHAGA Geopal Race participants (trackable tokens on geocaching.com) have 1 year to travel and gather as much mileage as possible, and photographs during their travels and adventures, with the finish line at GHAGAFAP 2025.
Winners will be determined by mileage totals and qualifying photos within the race period: September 14, 2024 - through - GHAGAFAP 22 in 2025
What is a TB race?
A TB (trackable item) Race is a popular contest in geocaching terms, where activated trackable items travel from cache to cache and typically compete to earn the most 'mileage' from start to finish, or even set a goal of returning to a destination first after a goal has been met.
TBs each have their own custom listing page on geocaching.com with a description, a goal, and a photo gallery which displays any photos posted to logs from other geocachers over the course of its journey.
Each TB has a public reference code, and a private tracking code. The private code, visible and traveling only along with the TB itself, allows geocachers to log activity with it - from picking it up from a geocache to dropping it in another, or simply discovering it in person.
Each activity log with a location 'waypoint' (an associated geocache listing) in its journey allows the entire travel history to be mapped as it travels potentially around the world.
In this TB race, 'Portal Trackers' are individual trackable items, each on their own journey, but also belonging to a 'team' of other similar TBs, so together their statistics accrue to tally together to help the team win!
How to join the race
To enter the race, pick a team -
Team Gustov or
Team Linus (or both!) - and purchase a tracker token for $5
This can be done by etransfer and mail or meeting with Geoff May (thebruce0) in person at an event or elsewhere.
Contact at thebruce@cachetheline.net or thebruce0 on GC Messenger or in person if you are interested in attaining one.
Preparing your Tracker
After attaining a tracker, activate it at geocaching.com/track and edit the TB to give it a description and goal. Here is an example you can copy and paste into the TB description editor:
Goal:
I want to travel far and wide to visit as much as possible and tell people about GHAGAFAP! Please take photos of me, or with me out on your adventures, and share with your friends!
Description:
I'm Gustov/Linus and I'm competing against my friend Linus/Gustov in a race to GHAGAFAP 22 in June 2025! Our teams are collecting mileage for traveling and visiting geocaches, between September 14th 2024 and 2025 - GHAGAFAP events!
We hope you consider attending the Golden Horseshoe Are Geocachers And Friends Annual Picnic in 2025 in southern Ontario, it's gonna be awesome!
Find more details about GHAGAFAP at
GHAGAFAP.ca.
Find out more details about Portal Trackers at
CLHQ.net/partner/ghagarace
Feel free to add any other photos to the listing as you like. Remember your goal is to get people to want to help it travel and have photos taken!
You can send it out into the wild by placing it in a geocache to travel on its own, or keep it and have it follow you on your own journeys visited the caches you visit and snapping photos - just spread the cheer far and wide and the word about GHAGAFAP!
Winner selection
At GHAGAFAP 22 in 2025, the winning team will be determined by total mileage accrued across all team Trackers. These are referenced on each tracker's Portal Imprint pages (PI0664 and PI0663).
Valid distance will be tallied for each tracker based on their final mileage (as of the day before GHAGAFAP 22) subtracted by the starting mileage as of the earliest log posted on or after Sept 14, 2024.
Valid is best defined as 'reasonable' travel. For simplicity, mileage calculation does not include Challenge cache visits, often logged as Found long after physical visitation and may include unintended TB visits skewing mileage during world travels.
Additional individual winners will be selected by random draw from quantity of valid photos posted to each Portal Tracker's TB gallery. Valid photos must include the face of the tracker with "GHAGAFAP" visible.
Prizes
Team prizes for greatest mileage will be announced soon.
Individual prizes and quantity will be announced soon.
NULL Alert!
It's been reported that there is another unexpected contender in this race - the nuisance critter known only as "
Species NULL". This creature from the Cache Line Dimension is little understood and only rarely noticed, when it seems to get into places it shouldn't, including an incident of transdimensional rifts that have endagered our reality.
And now it has somehow managed to influence CLHQ's Portal Tracker system.
There are now numerous trackers in the wild with a visual snapshot, a sort of 'photobomb', of this creature's silhouette captured in the imprint.
In an effort to research and understand this little pest, which has appeared at other inconvenient times and places, any PINUL0 trackers found during this GHAGARACE period will be monitored by CLHQ.
If you are in possession of a NUL0 Portal Tracker, please handle it the same as the above racing participants (gather mileage and photos). And if you have any opportunity for NUL0 to cross paths with a Linus or Gustov tracker, please record the instance in a photo posted to a log for their TB page galleries.