CachingCentral

By Steph Slater

Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean or on the side of a rocky cliff, hiding in remote caves and dark crevices, lie treasures sought after by teams of explorers known as geocachers.

The geocachers record the coordinates of an object they wish to search for on the Internet and use Global Positioning System units to narrow the search to a specific location. “I’ve lived here 34 years, but the geocaching takes me to places I’ve never been before,” geocacher Monika Ragland of the AIMSless team of Safford said.

Ragland’s team consists of Paula Price and Kim Riddlesworth. They are a small group of retired teachers who now find adventures outside the classroom.

Full story…

OLATHE, KS/June 27, 2006 — Garmin today announced an update on the launch of its application support for Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger.” The company’s Training Center software is now expected to be compatible with Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” by the end of 2006. Also at that time, we will announce the expected completion date for Garmin’s other hardware and software applications. We thank the Mac community for their support, understanding and patience as we work through these unanticipated delays, and we look forward to providing Mac users with direct support for their Garmin products.

Source at http://www.garmin.com/pressroom/corporate/062706.html

It’s always fun to read an article where you know the actual people mentioned, unless of course it has to do with jail time. In the following article there’s a few names of Long Island, NY cachers that I’ve met many times. I don’t think the article mentions the LI caching site so just in case, it’s found at Long Island Geocaching Organization

---

Followers applaud the niche hobby for taking them on journeys to secret vistas and trails. And there are more than 2,000 “caches” in the New York City area alone. Nassau and Suffolk fans have the Long Island Geocaching Organization, created about two years ago and now with 250 members. They say the hobby has boomed particularly in the last year and a half.

“A lot of times, I’d go out and there’d be nothing new to do for weeks at a time,” Roy Anderson, 60, an electronicstechnician from East Islip, said of the earlier geocaching days. “Now, you go out and do 20 without a problem.”

The first cache arrived on Long Island one snowy February day in 2001, about a year after the game started in Portland, Ore. Fan legend has it that an out-of-town businessman left his motel and sauntered into the woods of Blydenburgh County Park. He left a log book and hid the cache, noting the coordinates and later recording them onto www.geocaching.com.

Then, he gave the cache a name: the Weary Traveler.

Full Story…

By JOHN HARRINGTON

Montana tourism officials are taking advantage of a popular sport/hobby with an interactive advertising campaign in the Twin Cities designed to get more Minnesotans to visit Big Sky Country.

Participants in the month-long “Montana GPS Quest” can use their personal global positioning satellite units to find Montana postcards “hidden” at businesses throughout the Twin Cities region. The first person to find each day’s postcard calls a special phone number to claim that day’s prize.

Geocaching, or using GPS devices to locate all manner of hidden prizes, trinkets or other items, is gaining popularity as more people embrace the technology. The Travel Montana contest is an extension of a print and broadcast advertising campaign that features GPS and several Montana adventures.

Each morning at 9, the promotion’s Web site announces the coordinates for that day’s postcard. It might be an outdoor store, bike shop or other retailer or location that fit the adventurous outdoor image.

Full story…

A short article out of Minnesota about a family just bitten by the geocaching bug.

---

The trail in Rochester’s Indian Heights Park is walked daily by hikers, but few have probably stopped to inspect the pile of bark and sticks along a trail tucked back into the northeast park.

But on this day, this spot — about a 10-minute hike from the parking lot — was getting a thorough looking over by four eager kids.

“We found it, we found it,” shouted Matt Steinmetz, 4, to his older brothers and sister who had circled the cache (pronounced “cash”), a duct-taped Tupperware container holding a trove of trinkets, a pad of paper and a pencil.

Full story…

An entertaining guide to geocaching, even if you’re a veteran cacher. The writer has a good sense of humor.

---

By MATT WASTRADOWSKI It’s a drizzly spring morning (aren’t they all?). I’m walking up and down Frenchman’s Bar with one of my best friends and we’re looking for treasure. The loot isn’t on par with legendary bank robber D.B. Cooper’s haul, whose spoils washed up on the same shores in 1980, but by the time our guide tells us we’re within 50 feet, the excitement is palpable. After climbing under a log here and there, holding back branches to clear our path and tripping over the forest floor, we stumble upon our bounty.

We open a gray metal ammo box and find, among other trinkets, a bouncy ball and Scooby Doo key chain.

Our find might not equal Cooper’s take, but he never ­experienced the thrill of geocaching­.

Full story…

Out of Oklahoma comes another story about a cache being blown up under suspicion it’s a bomb. While I can understand this being the case a year ago, or in a location that hasn’t had this problem occur before, I’m baffled at why law enforcement isn’t smart enough to spend 30 seconds searching http://www.geocaching.com to see if there’s a cache hidden at that exact location? I guess law enforcement doesn’t know the old adage of “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

---

By Alice Collinsworth

EDMOND — It wasn’t a good day for geocacher Diane Surtees when friends told her the police were looking for her.

Surtees is hardly the type to plant an incendiary device, but her “Chicken Lips” Geocaching package — made from a paintball tube, wrapped in camouflage tape and attached to a tree — looked like a pipe bomb to a passerby, who called police.

hicken Lips, one of about 100 caches in Edmond, was hidden near a church and a school, adding to the finder’s suspicions. Bomb squad technicians rushed to the scene, and the package was eventually blown apart. Inside, officers found a spiral notebook, plastic toys, an Oklahoma rose rock and a card identifying Surtees’ caching name, “Okie Rose Rocks.”

But two explosives technicians, four patrol officers and one supervisor had spent at least 90 minutes at the Chicken Lips scene, along with the bomb squad’s investigative robot. Sgt. Scott Fees, supervisor of the Edmond Police Department bomb squad, estimated the cost in man hours and expenses at $800.

Chicken Lips was the second geocache incident in Edmond in the past year, Fees said.

The sport’s popularity is increasing rapidly nationwide, but law enforcement officers aren’t entirely happy with the trend.

Full story…

by Susan Wood

STATELINE – A first-time event that’s growing in popularity across the United States put Lake Tahoe on the map last weekend.

On the official opener to the summer season, the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority launched a geocaching treasure hunt ending Sunday.

Lee Szromba combed the south end of Fallen Leaf Lake area to come up with one of two first-prize finds in the wilderness, seizing celebrity golf tournament tickets by the end of the weekend.

“We must have walked four or five miles today,” the 69-year-old South Lake Tahoe man said Sunday evening. He mentioned also being the first to find the cache at Kiva Beach.

More than 400 competitors – about a third registered from Tahoe – tested their navigating skills via a global positioning system designed to get them to within 30 feet of the 50 treasures marked by a box called a cache site. Some were set in the urban environment. Others required a mile-long hike off the beaten path. When found, participants placed their slips in the box and became eligible for more than $10,000 in prizes. They ranged in size from trinkets to hotel stays.

Full story…

When I saw the title of this article I thought it was another story on some ammo can being found and thought to be a bomb, but that wasn’t the case. It was about a Kansas journalist being ill prepared with his 2 kids in tow.

---

By Andrew Hartsock

The Cap’n warned me.

I had communicated with the Cap’n – aka Chris Coffman – about the possibility of writing about geocaching, an electronic treasure hunt in which participants use GPS units to track down hidden “caches.” It’s part scavenger hunt, part hiking, and since the return of the outdoors page to the Journal-World, I’ve received more e-mails requesting stories about geocaching than any other outdoors endeavor.

Since the J-W had a story on geocaching just last fall, I was reluctant, but the Cap’n, an avid geocacher, thought it wasn’t too soon for another.

However, he added a caution.

“Physically, doing the sport is harder this time of year,” he said. “There are lots of ticks and poison ivy, and the thicker vegetation makes it more difficult to find the hidden caches. Spring and fall are the perfect times for geocaching.”

But Cap’n be darned, I figured we could brave the elements enough to test the geocaching waters, and, heck, it wasn’t like we were leaving the city. The two closest caches to my house were less than a mile away.

So I and my two children – 5-year-old son Brooks and 8-year-old daughter Carlyn – armed ourselves with a cheap GPS unit and printouts of the two caches’ locations and hopped in the car.

Full story…

From Calgary Canada comes an article introducing caching to those not familiar with the hobby. It also talks about the popularity and how Canadian government is starting to take notice.

Treasure hunting takes on high-tech feel in pastime designed for the entire family

By MATT POWERS

Call it a high-tech game of hide-and-seek. Modern-day treasure hunters, armed with global positioning system receivers and other gadgets, are staging treasure hunts across the city and around the province.

Known as geocaching, the new pastime sees participants log onto specialty websites, download co-ordinates for hidden treasures and then trek out to locate the goods.

Hiding places can rage from the top of a mountain to a crowded outdoor market.

“Just like real estate, it’s all about location, location, location,” says geocacher Tim Wolfenberg.

“When I am out placing a cache, I make sure it’s in a place that is esthetically pleasing.

“It’s usually in something like a park or near a river so visitors to the cache leave with a good impression of the sport and it is something they want to try again.”

Wolfenberg had never heard of the niche activity until about 18 months ago. He had been searching for a store that sold and repaired GPS units when he came across the Calgary Area Cachers homepage, www.calgarycach- ers.ca, created by Tom LaFleur.

Full story…