CachingCentral

Ohio – An apparent scavenger hunt caused the evacuation of residents and businesses Wednesday night as a bomb squad investigated a “suspicious package” left outside the Monroe Historical Society, 10 Elm St.

The Butler County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad took a digital X-ray of the package at the scene, and determined it was not hazardous.

Inside the box was a notebook with directions for an apparent scavenger hunt or geocaching game, according to sheriff’s deputies and Monroe police.

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I’m recently back from 2+ weeks in Alaska where I had a couple of chances to do a few geocaches. Nothing major as I didn’t have a lot of time at each stop, but enough to pop over and grab a convenient one that was close by. During the trip I was on a train that passed through but didn’t stop in Wassila, the area the article below mentions. The article is a typical intro type article, featuring a geocacher and her drive to get others interested in the hobby.

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A nice story in a South Carolina paper on geocachers and a CITO event they initiated. Instead of a story on a bomb or “destroying nature” it shows geocachers in a good way. Here’s a snippet:

A large part of the geocachers’ game is to help clean up the playing sites along the way, hence the term “Cache in Trash Out.”

Some of the helpers weren’t geocachers, though. USCGA spokeswoman Lisa Corley said that would probably change.

“I’m willing to bet that 80 percent of these people are going caching soon,” Corley said, with a smile.

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A typical geocaching story in a Florida newspaper. Some snippets from the article…
“It’s not about what’s in the containers … it’s just about the adventure,” said DiFede, of Pembroke Pines, who has found 359 caches in three years. “It’s almost like going on a scavenger hunt.”

Finding a cache can take minutes or days, as DiFede and a team of five cachers learned while seeking out the Red Scorpion cache at Jonathan Dickinson State Park near Jupiter.

The two-day search took the geocachers, who only knew each other through the geocaching Web site, on an 11-mile hike and canoe ride through the park.

“It took you to all the best spots in the park,” said David Obrien, 40, of Sunrise, a geocacher for three years.

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A nice intro to Geocaching article from Wisconsin. The article talks about many aspects, with input from actual cachers, providing advice with getting started and finding cachers.

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Came across an interesting Windows application called RoboGEO which can take a tracklog or waypoints from your GPS and geocode (add longitude and latitude) to photos you took based on matching timestamps between the photo and GPS info.

Besides the primary function of geocoding the internal (EXIF) info for pictures, it can add a watermark to the bottom of each with the time, lattitude, longitude and other info. You can create Google Maps (sample – click the pushpins) as well as use withing Google Earth, export to GPX, Flickr, Autocad, MapPoint and more.

The application costs $34.95 and is worth checking out if you take a lot of pictures which geocaching or other activities that would permit a GPS to also be in use.