CachingCentral

By CAROL BARKER, T&D Region Editor

I had an opportunity to visit one of my favorite places recently, the Rivers Bridge State Historic Site near Ehrhardt in Bamberg County. While at this site where Confederates tried in vain to halt Union General William Sherman’s march to Columbia, I met a man and his daughter from Hampton County who were on a high tech treasure hunt for a cache using handheld Global Positioning Satellite devices.

The worldwide sport of geocaching, which is detailed at the official Web site, www.geocaching.com, involves utilizing location coordinates and clues to find hidden boxes or caches that contain something for the finders. The GPS units can get geocachers to within 6 to 20 feet of the treasure. Treasure ranges from information about local attractions to movie tickets to jokes to jewelry to CDs. The finder is expected to take something from the box and leave something for the next finder. The boxes also contain a log book in which finders sign in and make comments about their searches.

The fellow I met who was successful in finding the cache hidden at Rivers Bridge said the treasure at that particular location was contained in an ammunition box. Sometimes the caches are contained in Tupperware containers or even plastic buckets, he said.

The man’s next quest is to locate a cache hidden in Clio, Ga. (Effingham County).

I got a kick out of learning about geocaching. I had never heard of it before. A friend of mine who works for The State newspaper was with me that day. She had never heard of it, either. We both rushed back to tell our respective feature editors about geocaching to try to beat each other’s newspapers to the story. Our egos were deflated when we learned that stories about geocaching had been done two years ago! We were a little late on the draw.

Full story…

By Sandra Johnson-Bohannan
Staff Writer

MAURICE RIVER TWP. — A teenage girl was airlifted and treated for hypothermia, after a treasure hunt went sour Saturday afternoon.

Two counselors and three juvenile girls from the Woodbine group home, Rainbow of Hope, went Geocaching at around 3:30 p.m. in the woods between Weatherbee and Hunter’s Mill roads, according to Sgt. Sean Day of Port Norris State Police Barracks.

Geocaching is a high-tech game where adventurers can punch longitude and latitude coordinates into a GPS (Global Positioning System) device to search for and locate treasure, according to www.geocaching.com/faq. The only requirement is to replace the treasure with something for the next person to discover.

Unfortunately, the group was unable to figure out how to work the GPS device, had no flashlights or survival gear and ventured so deep into the woods that they were lost and crawling in tangles and marshy areas, Day said.

At around 5:15 p.m., the group called 911 for assistance, and both Port Norris and Cape May Coast Guard helicopters were dispatched to the scene.

Full story…

By Tom Paulu

The next time you drive through Longview’s Civic Circle, past the library or Monticello Hotel, consider that treasure is hidden in three places.

Other boxes of goodies are tucked away along local sloughs and under the bushes of local parks, challenging participants in a high-tech hobby that has spread around the globe.

In geocaching, pronounced “geo-cashing,” people hide things in woods and cities and note the latitude and longitude with their GPS units, which are handheld electronic devices that determine locations within 6-20 feet. The coordinates and clues to each site are posted at the Geocaching Web site, so that other people can try to find them.

It’s harder and more habit-forming than it sounds.

Bruce Fischer, 35, of Longview started geocaching in 2003 after a friend mentioned it. By now, Fischer has found some 1,000 sites and hidden 20 of them.

Fisher, whose geocaching moniker is “Stump,” showed off a couple of sites this week. The description for the Dike Access site suggests parking at the nearby John Null Park. Once you’ve punched the proper coordinates into a GPS unit, it points in the right direction and tells how many feet away the cache is. But it doesn’t tell how to cross the slough — walkers have to find a bridge on their own. When the GPS said the cache was 20 feet away, searchers relied on their eyes until they spotted a steel ammunition box in a stump, partially obscured with bark.

Full story…

They came to Ireland from the United States, Scotland and the Netherlands. There were 20 in all, gathered at the Royal Dubliner Hotel to share a toast, plan tomorrow’s adventures and pool their files from a day of geocaching.

The notion of hidden treasure long has captivated imaginations, so it’s no surprise that the 21st century has put a technological spin on the sport. Geocaching, as it is called, began in May 2000 when then-President Clinton removed the restrictions on satellites in the global positioning system (GPS), making that information available for civil and commercial use, in addition to the military.

GPS devices already had hit the mainstream, but the lifting of what is called Selective Availability rendered the possibility of pinpointing a location about 10 times more accurate.

Armed with Internet access and hand-held GPS devices, people from each of the 50 states and 210 other countries gathered in Dublin in September to track down designated sites in Ireland and Scotland – just for the fun of it.

Full story…

By: ERNIE COWAN – For the North County Times

In an Arizona cactus wilderness, Kevin Svetich of Escondido knelt down to move a large rock and smiled when he spotted the treasure chest hidden underneath.

Svetich was with buddies on a javelina hunt when he took a break to enjoy a growing outdoor sport that uses global positioning system units to locate strategically hidden “treasures.”

As the final hunting seasons wind down and fishing slows, many outdoor enthusiasts are discovering the fun of this sport, known as geocaching.

Using hand-held GPS units, they seek thousands of stashed goodies tucked away in caches that have been hidden all over the world.

The “treasure” in the caches is not of great value, but the challenge and excitement of finding some of the caches is like discovering gold for many of the geocachers.

The sport of geocaching gets people outdoors and takes them to places they might never see otherwise. The skills used in geocaching involve route-finding, tracking, hiking and observing —- all valuable to hunters or fishermen.

The heart of geocaching is the Web site www.geocaching.com. Here, Internet visitors can see where the thousands of caches are hidden and download coordinates for the ones they want to seek. In the Anza-Borrego Desert, for example, there are perhaps 200 to 300 caches, hidden in locations as easy as next to a roadside sign or as challenging as the summit of remote mountain peaks.

Hand-held GPS units can be purchased for as little as $80.

Full story…

New eXplorist Handhelds First to Deliver PC-Style File Management, Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries and Geocaching Application – All in a Compact and Affordable Package
LAS VEGAS, CES Booth #31256, South Hall/Upper Level, Jan. 5

/PRNewswire/ — Thales continues to rewrite the rulebook for handheld GPS as
it announces today the CES debut of three additions to its breakthrough
Magellan(R) eXplorist(TM) line of compact, powerful, yet easy-to-use
receivers. Complete with built-in mapping, the Magellan eXplorist 400,
eXplorist 500 and eXplorist 600 are the first handheld GPS receivers to
deliver PC-like file management, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and a PC
application designed specifically for transferring geocache information from
the Internet to the eXplorist for the popular web-based outdoor activity
called geocaching. These new eXplorist handhelds represent the definitive GPS
guidance solution to meet the more diverse navigation needs of today’s
consumer — both in the city and the outdoors. The complete Magellan
eXplorist line of six receivers delivers more advanced features, more powerful
performance, and more value than the competition, from just $99.99 to $449.99.

Full story….

OLATHE, Kan., Jan. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Garmin International Inc.,
a unit of Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN), today unveiled the GPS 60 and GPSMAP(R)
60 — two feature-packed handheld GPS navigators with large, high-resolution
monochrome displays. The products made their debut at the 2005 International
Consumer Electronics Show and will be displayed at the company’s booth
(#31250).

“The new GPS 60 and GPSMAP 60 have many of the same features as our newer
color units, yet they’re priced within the reach of a larger audience,” said
Gary Kelley, Garmin’s director of marketing. “We expect these handheld units
to be popular with anyone needing a reliable, rugged, and easy-to-use handheld
GPS receiver — for recreational or professional applications.”

The GPS 60 and GPSMAP 60 both feature an ample 160 x 240 4-level grayscale
display and a bright LED backlight. Battery life is among the best in the
industry — offering 28 hours (typical use) on just two AA batteries. For
fast and versatile data transfer, the units offer both USB and serial
connections.

The GPSMAP 60 has a routable North and South American basemap and 24 MB of
internal memory for use with Garmin’s extensive line of MapSource(R)
cartography, including City Select(R), U.S. Topo 24K(TM), U.S. Topo,
Recreational Lakes with Fishing Hot Spots(R), Minnesota LakeMaster, and
BlueChart(R). Using MapSource City Select, the GPSMAP 60 offers automatic
turn-by-turn route calculation with tone prompts to addresses or points of
interest — a feature normally found in higher-priced GPS navigators. The GPS
60 is a non-mapping unit that comes pre-loaded with a 1 MB city point
database, and the unit is compatible with the MapSource Points of Interest CD.

Both the GPS 60 and the GPSMAP 60 can store up to 500 waypoints, 50
routes, and 10,000 track points. The units also offer a dedicated geocaching
mode, indoor/outdoor GPS games, an alarm clock, sunrise/sunset and moon phase
tables, and optimal hunting and fishing times.

Full story…

By Connie Farrow, Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — An increasingly popular game of grown-up hide-and-seek is leading adventurers around the country on high-tech hunts for hidden treasures.

It’s called geocaching, and all you need to play is a portable Global Positioning System, access to the Internet and a sense of adventure.

Players enter coordinates in longitude and latitude from a Web site into their GPS, and the hunt is on. Geocachers follow the navigation signal and a list of clues that take them through cemeteries, caves, forests and even historic homesteads

At the end of hunt is a treasure — some kind of trinket or toy — stashed in an airtight container, although sometimes there is only a logbook for players to sign.

Sound easy?

Full story…