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  • Writer's pictureEmma Kent

Beyond the Badge: Girl Guides of Canada's 100 Anniversary Geocaching Coin


A few months ago, Ann, a very kind reader, sent me her 2010 Girl Guide of Canada Geocoin; used in the game of geocaching. For those new to geocaching, it’s an outdoor activity that uses GPS or a Global Positioning System to play a global game of hide and seek. Players will leave containers or ‘caches’ at specific locations and post it online for others to find. Often, players or ‘Geocachers’ will hide little items in their caches to trade or in the case of a geocoin as a secondary activity. When I was a staff at Camp Woolsey, I used to lead geocaching and often still take my Spark unit.


Geocaching started in 2000 and the following year, the first geocoin was created by Jon Stanley or Mount Bike as he is known in the geocaching world. Stanley created the first coins as a type of signature item to leave in the caches he found, but soon they started to move around and a new aspect of geocaching was created. Now Geocoins are very common and there are lots of websites developed to track them. The idea is that you will place your coin in one cache with a travel goal, for example, you might want your geocoin to travel across Canada or the world. When people find the coin in the cache they can log it and try to bring it closer to its goal.


For the 100th anniversary of Girl Guides in Canada, some Guiding Geocoins were released. These coins are a little larger than a Canadian toonie with one has the 100th anniversary and the Girl Guide of Canada logo and the other has some artwork of a pathfinder hiking in a cartoon style that was used in Girl Guides of Canada promotional material at this time with the coin’s code along the bottom. My coin came in a little clear booklet and with a small insert saying it was made by Landsharks.com and that they also make custom coins and metals.


When researching for this post, I found out from my friend and former Camp Woolsey staff, Jaf, that Camp Woolsey, where I learned to Geocache, had one of these coins. In 2011, the Woolsey Wanderers (a nickname used for our out trips) put one of the coins in a cache in the Byward Market in downtown Ottawa. Jaf’s parents are kind of a big deal in the Ottawa Geocaching scene and they were able to track down some information about the Woolsey coin. The coin first traveled to Quebec and then onto France but hasn’t been logged since 2018. That coin code is TB3JT39, if you are interested in looking it up on its tracking page.


I’m not sure how many of these Geocoins were produced and if you search for ‘Girl Guides of Canada ‘on the Trackable page of geocaching.com, you’ll get 490 results and each listing has the 100th-anniversary logo. One former office staff I talked to over facebook remembers when she worked as part of the program team at provincial they would occasionally log in and see where each coin was. She says in those early days most of them were not moving but there were a few which moved a lot and gained great distance! Geocoins often have a goal of international travel. I want to try and figure out if any have made it overseas. I posted in the UK Facebook group “I love Guiding history’ and one member had said they had come across one of the coins while geocaching in Bulgaria and another remembers finding a coin in the UK in 2015 and dropped it off again in France. Girlguiding hasn’t issued their own geocoin yet but a Canada Guider remembers finding some Geocaching trackable made by units.


There are still plenty of these coins out there and as Guiding and Geocaching are both hobbies of mine I feel very lucky to have one of these in my collection. I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for them in the wild.


Special Thanks to Anna F, Jen D, Jaf and her family



Thanks for Reading and Happy Geocaching!

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