CachingCentral

Geocaching – a treasure hunt for adults – may have been the first sport created in the new millennium.

Jana Iannello, a retired San Antonio schoolteacher, got her first GPS unit and found her first cache in January 2002 after watching a TV news story featuring reporter Diane Sawyer climbing through a forest in search of a hidden box. Geocaching reminded Iannello of childhood games her mother used to create, with clues that led to coloring books and other surprises.

“When I found geocaching I said, ‘Oh, I can do treasure hunts again!’ ” Iannello said.

Iannello, however, quickly ran out of caches to look for. There were only three in San Antonio. She and a growing cadre of geocachers have remedied that by dreaming up hundreds of clever tricks and cryptic clues for new hiding places. They use a Web site on the Internet to post coordinates and commentaries and keep track of how many caches they have each hidden and found.

Iannello, an outgoing strawberry blonde whose geocaching moniker is “Cybercat,” has found more than 2,000 caches and hidden another 200 plus.

That puts her at No. 9 on the list of Texas geocachers. “It’s just a ton of fun,’ Iannello says. “The people who do geocaching are the neatest people in the world.”

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Although the craze has swept worldwide in the past five years-invading some 217 countries with more than 209,653 active caches- local participation is purveying interest to the tune of 1,414 sites in Kansas and numerous sites in and around Marion County that include virtual, puzzle, multi-caches and traditional caches.

Doug and Debbie Evans of Canton know all about geocaching, having been actively seeking hidden treasures since August 2003.

“We had a gathering down in Tulsa, and there were a lot of people there that were already into geocaching,” Doug said. “Two ladies kidnapped me and took me out looking for my first cache and that was all it took.

“By Thanksgiving I had a GPS unit of my own, and we haven’t stopped since.”

There is no typical “geocacher.”

“We know of a sheriff officer, an accountant, a pilot for the Galicia Medical Group-just anyone can do this, and it’s done worldwide,” Doug said.

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ERIC BOLSTRIDGE likes to check on his hidden treasure at least once a day.

“Every time I leave for home, I glance over to see if anyone is there,” says Bolstridge, 27, who lives in Burke and works near the Arlington County Courthouse.

Bolstridge’s treasure — four state quarters in a magnetic hide-a-key box — isn’t the kind of thing that would get Indiana Jones out of bed in the morning. But to Bolstridge and other geocachers, the reward is in the hiding and finding.

“Holy Jumping Jiminy!” reads an entry in the logbook of one of John Grace’s caches. “Fifth times a charm.”

The cache — an ammo box whose contents include toy soldiers, a balsa-wood glider and dinosaur-print pencils — is one of several Grace hid in the 68-acre Audubon Rust Sanctuary in Leesburg. It took him six months to convince land managers that geocaching would be a good way to attract visitors.

“I wanted to help share places I like with people who might never find them,” Grace says.

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Bismarck teachers are creating a new crop of cachers through physical education and other classes.

“It’s a great lesson on perseverance,” physical education teacher Kurt Weinberg said.

Weinberg takes his students at Pioneer and Highland Acres schools out to Cross Ranch State Park to geocache, the name of the game to find hidden containers with a global positioning unit and a set of clues. Weinberg likens it to a high-tech Easter egg hunt.

Creating binary code, haunting cemeteries and remembering historic dates for clues are a few of the tasks it takes to find the containers, known as caches, stashed within 55 miles of Bismarck. At Cross Ranch State Park, it’s much simpler than deciphering computer code and it doesn’t involve grave markers.

But it does involve math and following directions. Besides the physical benefits of getting the students outdoors and moving around, Weinberg said he likes the thinking and problem-solving skills geocaching teaches, as well as the teamwork involved in sharing global positioning system units.

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Channel 8 News in Austin Texas has a nice piece on Geocaching which includes the ~2 minute video segment where they go on a nice hike with 2 cachers – Tanya Phillips & Daniel Hadad.

In fact, this treasure hunt is more about the hike than the “swag” at the end.

“I just love solving a puzzle, a mystery. For me, it’s just getting out there and finding it. The adventure of it,” Hadad said.

“Because someone has created a cache there, I get to go someplace they have already defined as a beautiful place to visit, or a really great walk with a really great view, or some really tricky hide that’s so unusual that you’ve got to see this. So they take me some place I wouldn’t normally have been,” Phillips said.

Sometimes the treasure is going someplace you would have never gone. Travel bugs are items marked with instructions for cachers.

“I had a travel bug named Woody that someone took to Paris for me and photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. So, I’m living vicariously through my travel bug,” Phillips said.

Mostly, though, it’s a way for cachers to travel and find some treasure.

Full story and link to the video…

An interesting article from Penn State University about the hobby and a cache placed there…

Today’s libraries are not just for books, computers and magazines — one university library now has its own geocache thanks to a Penn State librarian.

“The libraries wanted to reduce anxiety and introduce freshmen to the library during orientation, ” says Linda Musser, head of the Fletcher L. Byrom Earth and Mineral Sciences Library at Penn State. “This year’s overall theme was sports and geocaching is a hot new sport. We wanted to have some fun.”

The geocache set up by Musser is a little unusual in that it is inside a building. GPS systems do not work well inside, so she could provide only the location of the building as GPS coordinates. From that point, clues must lead the player to the library itself and then on to the cache.

“It was mostly freshmen who participated,” Musser told participants at the 117th annual meeting of the Geological Society of America meeting today (Oct. 16) in Salt Lake City. “Once in the library they had to do an activity to find the cache.”

The idea of a library geocache came from the increased popularity of geocaching and the recent implementation of a joint project by the National Parks Service and the Geological Society of America called Earthcaching.

Earthcaching is identical to geocaching but there is no box and the objective is to see a geological formation, event or anomaly. Earthcaching becomes a search for knowledge rather than a search for prizes. Twisting this concept just a bit, geocaching in a library incorporates both knowledge and a few small prizes.

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A quick blurb on geocaching in Canada…

Parks Canada is worried that a new high-tech game called geocaching could be harming the environment.

Parks Canada temporarily banned physical geocaches earlier this year, because people hunting items in off-trail locations could interfere with wildlife.

It is consulting with geocachers to develop a permanent policy in 2006, the Parks Canada website says.

Full story…

I am a human cruise missile, zigging and zagging through the forest with the same technology that guides our military’s smart bombs to their bridges and bunkers.

If all goes to plan, data beamed from a cluster of navigational satellites 22,240 miles overhead will steer me unerringly to my target: a bucket with some tchotchkes in it.

This relatively new pastime — basically a high-tech scavenger hunt — is called geocaching, and it’s become wildly popular among owners of handheld GPS (Global Positioning System) units. It’s so popular, in fact, that the Tenaya Lodge, just outside Yosemite National Park near Wawona, has begun offering a geocaching program along with its nature hikes and horseback riding outings. I signed up for it recently to sample both the sport and the hotel.

Tenaya Lodge began offering the geocaching program this fall, and I was one of the first to sign up. Essentially, the sport is a cross between orienteering and a treasure hunt using high-tech navigation. Someone hides a “cache” — typically a plastic or metal bucket with a lid — with a logbook and some goodies in it and publishes the precise latitude and longitude on the Web. The goal is to dial those coordinates into your handheld GPS unit and have it lead you to the stash.

“Some people call it a hobby,” said Bryan Roth, co-founder of Groundspeak, the Web site’s parent company, “and others call it an addiction.”

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The average person wouldn’t recognize Tim Driver’s hunting tools — a global positioning satellite unit, laptop computer, a Palm Pilot and the Internet — as the normal accoutrements of someone stalking quarry. Then again, the average hunter isn’t looking for canisters and buckets filled with fast food restaurant toys, gold dollar coins and cartoon character dolls.

But Driver loves his type of hunting for the same reason other men love to stalk four-legged game.

“It’s the thrill of the hunt; that’s the number one reason,” he said. “Then, of course, the family aspect ties directly into that.”

Trish Wooten of Galveston has found caches as far away as Uvalde, but she says there are plenty of caches right in her own back yard.

“There are a ton of caches on Galveston Island,” she said.

For Wooten, a consultant for the University of Texas Medical Branch, geocaching is a way to add adventure to her family’s favorite hobby: camping. Her husband, Ron, is a teacher at Ball High School.

“We love to camp and every state park we have gone to, we have done geocaching,” she said.

Dave Young, who is 68 and lives in Santa Fe, has been geocaching for about five years. Like Wooten and Driver, he enjoys being outdoors and getting exercise while seeing the sights. He too was surprised at how many caches there are in Galveston County.

Young said he has learned much about his home county because of geocaching.

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When Robin Kent, 42, isn’t working as a baker for Safeway, he’s out traipsing the woods hunting for treasure. But the treasure he hunts for isn’t gold or jewels. It’s Tupperware tubs and the like, filled with trinkets and other doodads.
Kent is a geocacher. Geocachers use global-positioning satellite units to find caches of items hidden by other people using latitude and longitude coordinates.

“It’s a brand new sport,” he said. “It’s kind of like hi-tech treasure hunting. I use billion-dollar satellites to go hunting for Tupperware in the woods.”

He first learned of geocaching in March 2003 when he bought his first GPS unit. He wanted to learn how to use the unit, so he began looking on the Internet for sources of interest.

In 2003, he sought his first geocache in Buffalo Park. The cache was a spice container with a log book and some business cards.

“I got hooked after that,” he said, grinning. “It takes you places you wouldn’t think to go. I go to places where I never would have thought of going.”

Full story…