CachingCentral

Tourism officials are latching onto the growing popularity of high-tech scavenger hunts, but law officers don’t share the enthusiasm for finding strange packages in unexpected places.

In geocaching, people hide stashes in public places and post the locations’ coordinates online. Other players – geocaching has an estimated 1 million enthusiasts worldwide – use handheld Global Positioning System devices to get close to the treasure then rely on their wits and a keen eye to make the find.

John Kuehl, the eBusiness director for Wisconsin’s Department of Tourism, wants communities to nominate local sites of beauty or historical significance. The state will then list the sites online by their GPS coordinates.

Arkansas and Pennsylvania, meanwhile, list geocaching suggestions on their Web sites along with rules for proper land use. But some law enforcement officials are less excited about the geocaching craze.

George Sheridan, the sheriff of Delaware County, Ind., had a bomb squad detonate a small black box that turned out to be a cache hidden near a set of railroad tracks.

“I suggest that individuals who leave these packages call local law enforcement first and let them know what’s going on,” Sheridan said. “Otherwise we’ll handle it as a suspicious package, a possible explosive device.”

The South Carolina House approved a bill in May that requires participants to get written permission to stash or look for a cache in a cemetery, historic or archaeological site, or property publicly identified by a historical marker.

Full story…

The sport of geocaching already has many variations. Here are just a few:

Geodashing is about visiting dashpoints, randomly selected longitude and latitude locations on the earth’s surface which people locate using their GPS devices. Players then log what they find on http://geodashing.gpsgames.org, sometimes with photos of what is there. The game is kept fresh by moving to new locations on the first of every month. But while the game is gaining in popularity, there still aren’t very many people playing it. According to one article on todayscacher.com, the most visited geodashpoint ever only had six logged visitors for the month it was active. Many geodash points never see a soul. The randomness of where the geodash points fall makes this game fun for players and many geodashers claim that they have a knack for falling in interesting spots. For December, according to Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint (www.brillig.com/geocaching), there are currently four geodash points in the “Boise Region,” which stretches from Lake Cascade to just south of the Idaho State Penitentiary south of the Boise Airport. Visit http://geodashing.gpsgames.org/ for more information about geodashing.

Benchmarking involves finding and documenting governmental survey markers placed by the National Geodetic Survey used to pinpoint landmarks like the tops of mountains or the corners of community parks. These markers aid in land surveying, civil engineering and mapping. While most are documented, some can be hard to find. On geocaching.com you can log when you find one. Many benchmarks have not been officially logged as found so the adventure of discovery could be yours for the taking.

Shutterspot is another GPS game where the first visitor to a site logs the GPS location and takes a picture. The game is to identify the exact location and replicate the photo.

Minute War is a virtual game of capture the flag using the entire world as the battleground. Everyone competes locally in their area but uses the same square grid divided into minutes. The first to capture the flag by visiting their square’s location wins.

Learn about other GPS games and variations on the above ones at www.gpsgames.com

Full article…

Geocaching glossary

Small gift exchanges are available all year to the growing number of people participating in the hide-and-seek sport of geocaching. It’s a high-tech treasure hunt giving the finder permission to take something, leave something and say something.

A quick search of the web site using the zip code for Red Feather Lakes, 80545, revealed 71 pages of sites radiating out 100 miles and extending into Wyoming. The number of records for that zip code was 1,403. Most of the sites were on U.S. Forest Service or Colorado State Forest land.

With the help of Chuck and Nancy Bell and their GPS unit, the novice Team Bell chose a site near Lost Lake on national forest land. The site is about 3 miles northeast of Red Feather Lakes and cached by Team Fegel on March 7, 2005. The geocache, named Lost Lake View, is at N 40º 49.9222 W 105º 32.536. It showed an icon for a “travel bug” at the site.

Three hours later, after many false starts up and down boulder fields, through slot canyons, pushing and hoisting an English setter over sheer rock, Team Bell finally stumbled upon the “uphill walk” where signs of a large, newly broken branch off a ponderosa signaled that others had come before. Soon the GPS sounded a celebratory beep–Team Bell had arrived.

As novice geocache hunters, Team Bell neglected to plot the route on a geophysical map of the area. But this didn’t detract from the enjoyment of the chase or the fun of finding the cache.

The cache ammunition box was well camouflaged in the low branches of a windswept, bonsai-shaped ponderosa. The 360-degree views were incredible. Team Bell signed into the logbook and was surprised to learn it was the sixth entry. The cache had an FTF (first to find) entry for March 19.

Full story…