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Orest Protch
The Fine Art of Geocaching
Geocaching can take you places you otherwise wouldn’t have visited.
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Orest Protch
The Fine Art of Geocaching
Around the world people have hidden approximately two million little treasure caches with the sole intent of having others find them.
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Orest Protch
The Fine Art of Geocaching
One geocache group we found were a series of fake golf balls and marked from one to seven.
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Orest Protch
The Fine Art of Geocaching
Sometimes “geocachers” leave little trinkets or toys for the finders to take as a souvenir.
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Orest Protch
The Fine Art of Geocaching
Items can occasionally be small and take some imagination to find.
Story & photos by Orest Protch
Our RV adventures started in 1988 and although we have had a variety of different units over the years, the one thing that hasn’t changed was our desire to find interesting things to see and do while camping. Are you looking for something to do besides playing golf, tennis, reading, cleaning the RV, or just chilling out?
In every city, in every province, in every state, and in virtually every country and continent around the world, travellers of all ages are purposely leaving little secret items behind. Do you want to know something even stranger? Other travellers are going around behind them and searching for these little secret items. Once the lagging travellers find these they sign their names to them, which are sometimes coded, and hide them again and move on the trail to snoop out the next one.
So, what on earth am I talking about? Geocaching, of course. Around the world people have secreted approximately two million little treasure caches with the sole intent of having others find them. These little goodies can vary in size but generally fall into five categories:
- Nano. Size of a nut or bolt
- Micro. Size of a film canister
- Small. Size of a small box or bag
- Medium. Size of a shoebox
- Large. Anything up to a five-gallon bucket
What these all have in common is that the person who hides them does the following:
- Choose the difficulty of the cache and the size of the cache from tiny to large. If size permits, they add treasures for kids, grandkids and adults to find.
- Choose the difficulty level of the terrain to reach it. This can range from flat and wheelchair accessible to a steep incline. They are numbered in difficulty from 1 (easy) to 5 (difficult).
- Put a small logbook or little notebook in each one so the "finders" can put their name and date they found it. If the cache is large, they put in some trinkets or toys for the finders to take as a souvenir. Usually these finders leave another trinket in its place.
- Hide the cache and uploads the GPS coordinates of the cache location to the geocaching website.
- Monitor the free geocache website to see how many people find it. These same people can upload information to the geocache website indicating that they did or did not find it and make additional comments. These are usually something like “great find,” “great hide,” or perhaps some additional clues – if it is a hard to find. Other comments can be on the beauty of the location.
Recently we camped at the Halcyon Hot Springs in BC and spent a few hours geocaching the area. One geocache GPS description explained the location was a free BC Provincial campsite and the entrance was off the main highway. Since it was so easily missed, they gave the GPS location of the campsite.
The park entrance was marked by a post and that was it. There was no big sign and the campsite was strikingly beautiful. I think maybe the sign was kept small so that only a few people would even know that it existed. It was less than a five-minute drive from the hugely popular hot springs. 99.9 percent of travellers (or even residents) would have driven right by it – and yes, we did find the hidden geocache.
There are three types of geocaches: Static, travelling and what I call, intertwined.
- Static. These remain in place. The geocache owner keeps track of people finding it and follows their comments. If too many people say they couldn’t find it, then the owner assumes that it was either disturbed by animals, vandals or inadvertently moved. He or she then goes and fixes it.
- Travelling. The geocache owner wants it to be picked up and moved by someone going closer, although not all the way, to an identified location somewhere in the world. The geocache owner may want it to travel to Texas, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Germany or even the Arctic. As people find it they drop it off somewhere else, closer to the destination. They then upload the move and new GPS coordinates to the geocache website, allowing others to search for it and move it closer to its final place.
- Intertwined. These are geocaches that are linked together in some way. One geocache group we found was a set of eight. They were fake golf balls and marked from one to seven. When I found the first one, it gave a clue to the second one (and so forth) until I found the final eighth one. Intertwined items are usually close in proximity to one another and can also be historical type caches. This means the cache group may be near a tourist or historic site. To find each one you must do some research on the clue.
The entertainment is the imagination of the people who hide these secret caches for others to find. There are websites that sell exotic cache containers and you are limited by your own imagination if you are the one hiding them.
The following are some of the more interesting finds by my family and extended family:
- My niece and her friend found a cache in the Oshawa, ON, area, which was a lockbox with a padlock and the box had an unlabeled "push here" button. On doing so, it began to beep at them. It took them a while to realize that the beeping was Morse code. Once they figured it out, they used their cell phone to record the beeps and then went back to their vehicle and used the internet to decipher the meaning. After an hour they translated the short and long beeps and had the combination to the lockbox. Their reward? They got to sign the logbook.
- My sister took her granddaughter geocaching for the first time when she was five years old. The granddaughters' first find was a pile of fake dog poop under a sign out in the middle of nowhere. What can be more fun than fake poop to a child?
- My wife and I have found fake hollowed out nuts and bolts that had been used to replace real bolts on various posts and signs. Inside was the tiny rolled up log sheet. We have also found a cache under a sign on a tree out in the bush off the path. The sign needed to be rotated to find the hole with the micro cache inside it.
- My daughter found one that had stumped us all when we were on a family walk in Muskoseepi Park in Grande Prairie, Alberta. It was a fake plastic water plant mixed in with real ones along the shoreline.
One word of warning. Be on the lookout for muggles – or non-geocaching folks – in the area you are searching who may be walking by, see you snooping around, and report your suspicious behaviour. Even worse, they might take the cache since they don’t know what it is or throw it away.
A GPS will usually take you to within three to five feet of a cache coordinate, and we have found that a GPS with readings in miles, yards and feet is more accurate than kilometres or metres. You can either use an actual handheld GPS or a cell phone and simply log onto the geocaching website and download the caches you want to look for.
We often carry a small bag with our Geocache supplies in it. This includes:
- GPS and batteries
- Tweezers. Some caches are tiny and you need to get the tiny log sheet out.
- Trinkets, toys and other treasures to exchange in caches we find.
- Cheap, foldable raincoat ponchos.
- Energy snacks
Geocaching is a great way to spend time outside in places that you live in or visit in your travels. You will find great locations in areas that you would never have otherwise gone to – even in your own home town or in areas where tourists may not even think of going to visit.