CachingCentral

By: Kevin O’Connor
Staff Reporter

DELAWARE COUNTY, Ind. (NLI) – An explosive incident Tuesday in Hartford City has raised questions about the safety of a popular electronic-age treasure hunting game with fans from coast to coast.

“It is a family friendly game,” Layne Cameron, author of “The Geocaching Handbook,” said. “But when somebody sees an empty container sometimes their first reaction, they jump to conclusions and think it’s more than just a game.”

Cameron said over one million people visit the Geocaching website every month. But Tuesday’s bomb scare was the first incident he’d heard of where a prize in the game had been mistaken for a dangerous object.

Delaware County’s bomb squad responded to Hartford City on Tuesday on a call about a suspicious looking object placed under a replica train near State Roads 3 and 18. The object was blown up as a precaution before authorities realized it was a part of the Geocaching game craze.

Workers at the Tin Lizzy restaurant noticed a man with kids milling around and eventually taking a package from underneath the replica train behind the restaurant. The man took something from the package, then replaced it under the train, and left.

It turns out the package was part of a Geocaching game. To play the game, Geocachers log on to a Web site to find coordinates and clues that lead to hidden treasures. The treasures are left by other players and put in hidden containers near landmarks.

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Satellites show the way in the new sport of geocaching
By Mark Clemens

Congratulations! You’ve found it! Intentionally or not! What is this hidden container sitting here for? What the heck is this thing doing here with all these things in it?
Standing on a hillside in Lake George, N.Y., I pored over the letter left in a Tupperware container that I’d found just moments before on a rock shelf. The note explained the somewhat mischievous rules of a new high-tech sport called geocaching (pronounced “geocashing”). Flush with excitement, I read on:

This container is part of a worldwide game dedicated to GPS (Global Positioning System) users. The game basically involves a GPS user hiding “treasure” (this container and its contents) and publishing the exact coordinates so other GPS users can come on a “treasure hunt” to find it. Geocaching is a relatively new phenomenon. Therefore, the rules are very simple:
1. Take something from the cache.
2. Leave something in the cache.
3. Write about it in the logbook.

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By Katy Knapp

It was 9 p.m., and all five members of the Hazeltine family reached the top of a 4-mile uphill hike after a 100-mile drive.

“It started with finding caches in each quadrant of Albuquerque, then used math and waypoint projections to lead us to the mountains in each quadrant of the state,” said Larry Hazeltine, Albuquerque resident.

Geocaching is an online game that uses a global positioning system device to find caches of objects.

It requires players to hide a box with a logbook and trinkets in it.

People in more than 200 countries play the game, using a GPS device to find the longitude and latitude of a cache.

“Someone can go out into the woods, a mountain top, a beach – anywhere you want,” game co-founder Bryan Roth said.

From there, people hide the box where it isn’t easily seen and use a GPS unit to determine its coordinates. Whoever finds the box has to sign the logbook, take the trinket, and replace it with something else.

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By JOHN NOLAN
Rochester Times

ROCHESTER — “Geocaching” is a word that is currently just below the general public’s radar but one that people are likely to hear with growing frequency — rather like “hacky sack” or “paintball,” although without the annoying connotations.

Geocaching, as an international network, has been made possible by the Internet, and many thousands of Web sites are now dedicated to the topic, with the daddy of them all being www.geocaching.com. For people wanting to discover more, the FAQ page of this site is a great starting point.

It is described as “an entertaining game” for users of global positioning systems (GPS units), but “obsession” may be a more appropriate word than “game,” judging by the way the phenomenon has spread across the entire globe, including Antarctica, in only three years.

These GPS unit-toting hunters, armed only with grid references and clues, track and seek out caches previously hidden by other geocachers who have named and submitted their challenges to geocaching.com, and which, having been approved, are posted on the massive site.

Like a myriad of towns and cities, Rochester already has its geocaching aficionados, and one of these is Richard Bailey, a retired GE employee and avid outdoorsman.

“Geocaching started in Washington State about three years ago and it has spread like wildfire, kind of like eBay. I was on a hiking site on the Internet in March of this year and somebody asked ‘Does anyone do geocaching?’ It sounded like fun, so I read up on it from the geocaching site,” said Bailey.

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How it’s pronounced: Geo-cashing, like cashing a check.

What it is: Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for Global Positioning System users. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the Internet. GPS users can use the location coordinates to find the caches.

Global Positioning System defined: The Global Positioning System is a constellation of U.S. government satellites providing the most advanced and accurate positioning and navigation service in the world. Equipped with atomic clocks, 24 GPS satellites orbit 12,000 miles above the Earth transmitting the exact time and their position in space.

What a GPS device is: A GPS unit is an electronic device that can determine your approximate location within 6 to 20 feet anywhere on the planet. Coordinates are normally given in longitude and latitude. You can use the unit to navigate from your location to another location. Some units have their own maps, built-in electronic compasses and voice navigation, depending on the complexity of the device.

The cost of a GPS unit: Units can range from $100 to $1,000, depending on the kind of capabilities you are looking for. A $100 unit can get you within 20 feet of most geocaches.

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JAMESTOWN, N.D. – Barb Sand and Paul Herman spend a lot of time wandering around. They’re not frequently lost – they’re geocaching.

“Paul would love for it to be a full-time job,” said June Herman, Paul’s mother.

“It kind of is already,” he replied.

Geocaching (pronounced geo cashing) is a relatively new hobby that uses Global Positioning Systems, or GPS locators, for a type of treasure hunt, Sand said. Geocachers use latitude and longitude coordinates to find a cache hidden by a fellow geocacher.

About 16 or more geocaches are hidden in Jamestown and surrounding communities, said Herman, of Montpelier. Many more are located throughout North Dakota and in 200 countries around the world.

“The whole thing just keeps growing and growing,” Sand said.

The name comes from geography and the process of hiding a cache, according to the official global GPS cache hunt Web site. A small, waterproof container, a metal canister or bucket is used for the cache.

A logbook and inexpensive trinkets such as buttons, toys or souvenirs are inside each cache, Sand said. The treasure hunter signs the logbook recording his or her visit, exchanging an item from the cache for an item the hunter brought along.

“Whenever you take something, you put something back in,” Sand said.

To find a cache, hobbyists start by logging onto http://www.geocaching.com. They get a list of all the caches within a certain radius of the place in which they want hunt.

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Players of all ages give letterboxing a stamp of approval

By MILES BLUMHARDT

First, there was treasure hunting. Then, there was geocaching. And now, there is letterboxing, which is geocaching with an imprisoned Martha Stewart twist.

While treasure hunting has gone the way of marbles, geocaching has gone the way of the X-Box with more than a half million people playing treasure hunting with global positioning system (GPS) units. More than 121,000 caches, which are breadbox size containers holding mostly worthless items, are hidden in more than 200 countries.

Letterboxing, well, like geocaching in 2000, it’s in its infancy. There are no numbers about participants and roughly 11,500 boxes are hidden in this country, including 140 and counting in Colorado and eight at last count in Larimer County.

“Not that many people know about letterboxing,” said Lin Wilder, who with her 6-year-old daughter Hanna are two of the few who play in Fort Collins. “But if you look at Web sites, there are more and more boxes being placed all the time. It’s one of those things that right now is small, but I hope it Treasure hunting, geocaching and letterboxing have many things in common. The treasures are found mostly in public places such as parks, open spaces and national forests.

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