Geocaching
by Scott Littlejohn
I feel the excitement build as my map and compass indicate I’m sooo close to the treasure. My pulse quickens as I scan the huge rocks in the forest glade around me and try to imagine where I would hide the treasure I’m looking for—to see if visualizing myself as the hider instead of the seeker helps me locate the object of my quest. I’ve spent the last hour following clues and trails, up and down hills, avoiding ‘Muggles’ and trying to make sense of my treasure map, because I know how sweet it will be to find the target where ‘X’ marks the spot…
…I’m describing my winter weekend here on Vancouver Island playing a new-found game; one I’m really excited about; one where I don’t need all the cartilage in both knees intact! Remember the fun you had as a kid looking for ‘treasure’? Want to get some exercise and become so involved in an activity that you don’t even notice you’ve had a workout? Interested in something you can do by yourself or with one or a hundred friends of all ages and fitness levels? Want me to just get on with it?!?!? Ok Ok…
About 5 million people worldwide regularly experience the thrill of modern day treasure hunting at every opportunity, wherever they are in the world, and they already know that I’m talking about Geocaching . Geocaching.com , the site of all things Geocaching, describes it this way:
“Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache's existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS device can then try to locate the geocache.”
There are over 1.2 million registered caches for you to find, with the U.S. and Germany being the real hotspots for the game, but Canada not far behind. Like me, you’ve undoubtedly walked right past geocaches many times without even knowing it- many are hidden in plain sight. So many caches, so little time!
Like me, you’ve probably heard of Geocaching, but don’t really understand what the fuss is about or how it really works. When our recent Tourism Association of Vancouver Island, at their annual conference, hired a company who specializes in team geocaching for conferences and corporate gatherings as a team building exercise for all of us tourism folks, my interest was piqued and I knew this was a mainstream activity I should know more about. And since I’d just upgraded my Blackberry to a new model with a GPS function, I went ahead and spent the ten bucks for the geocaching software for my phone and jumped off the cliff, figuratively speaking.
In a nutshell, this is how the game works:
Other geocachers place a cache or treasure somewhere they think would be a neat place to do so, and using their own GPS device, they note the latitude and longitude and register that exact location with geocaching.com. Then when a treasure hunter like me (and who doesn’t really want to be a pirate when you’re honest about it?) wants to go look for treasure, they get a list of the nearby caches they can search for. I just open my GPS program on my phone, it locates me, and I read the descriptions of the caches available (which shows how far away they are, and the level of difficulty needed to find them, both in terms of how well hidden they are and the type of terrain to expect). By reading a particular cache’s description, someone who only wants to walk on nice trails can choose caches that don’t involve any bushwhacking or lots of elevation changes. The new Blackberry, IPhone, or Android devices all have excellent GPS capability, and the $10 geocaching software was really easy to download and begin using, but for folks that want to be hardcore I’m sure a dedicated GPS device it will have even more bells and whistles- the geocache website has lots of hardware recommendations.
So with my Blackberry Torch phone in hand, my wife and I drive to Linley Valley --a huge Nanaimo trail network where we usually walk Ben, our golden retriever. I open the Geocache Navigator software, impatiently tap my foot for 30 seconds while the phone reaches out to the satellites in the sky to get an exact fix on us, and bink, a menu of nearby hidden treasures with cute names and descriptions appears on-screen. I select a cache a half mile away in the general direction I know the main trail goes, and with the push of a button, the phone screen turns into a bulls eye display with the cache icon as the target and a little red triangle (arrr, that would be us) showing the direction to go and how far away it is— let the game begin!
Suddenly our very familiar walk took on a new sense of purpose and urgency. Now the GPS tells you what direction and how far to go as the crow flies, but we’re not flying in a straight line-- we’re walking on one of the dozens of winding trails in the park, which has lots of rocky hills, cliffs, trees, valleys, and streams- so at every trail fork, we have to choose carefully to find our way to the treasure cache.
We take a wrong turn from time to time and retrace our steps. It’s really pretty funny how excited you get when the display shows that you’re 100 feet (or meters, if you’ve set your device up that way), then 50, then 20, and then 40??!!—yikes, we’ve gone past it and are going the wrong way- turn around!!! Finally, we zero in and when it gets down to 5 or 10 feet, you just put the device in your pocket, think about the clues you read on what the hiding place looks like, as in, “look behind the big rock next to the two big trees”--- oh fudge! There’s big rocks and trees everywhere!!! Which ones???
And then you finally see it- it’s got some carefully arranged leaves over it, but there it is- this time it’s in the form of a little sealed food container, but instead of lunch bag let-down inside, it has a pad of paper, a pencil and a bunch of little trinkets left by other cachers.
I proudly push the ‘MARK FOUND’ icon on the Blackberry and it spews our good news out to the satellites and within seconds, geocaching.com knows they have another successful round of the never ending game completed- it’s official- we feel immortal!- ok, that’s a stretch, but we do feel pretty exhilarated. My wife (who in fairness was the one who actually spotted it), writes our name in the little notebook, we add a little trinket of our own, and after resealing the ‘cachebox’ we carefully put it back, disguising it with some leaves for the next cachers, all the while being on guard not to be spotted by Muggles.
This from the glossary of terms found on geocaching.com:
Muggle A non-geocacher. Based on "Muggle" from the Harry Potter series, which is a non-magical person. Usually this term is used after a non geocacher looks puzzled after befriending a geocacher searching for a cache, or when a non-geocacher accidentally finds a cache. Geomuggles are mostly harmless.
So what do you do after you find a cache? Well smack me with a shovel and call me Doug - you search for another one, of course! If finding one was fun, then finding two must be more fun right? And it’s true. Like so many games worth playing - it’s pretty addictive. By the end of the weekend, I had over 10 caches logged. Heck we already had the phone, winter clothing, a dog and bodies in need of exercise, so why not – geocaching has lots to offer. The exercise I like is the kind where it just happens having fun.
Because geocaching was started by techie/online kinds of people ten years ago, it has a huge connected family of users who are all about welcoming new people into the game. There’s geocache cruises you can go on, geocache scuba diving trips, and for us RV’rs, geocache camping events all over the world - some for fun and some for cleaning up the environment, with regional clubs everywhere. It was huge before, but with it being available on smart phones now, it is going to explode (you heard it here first).
Vancouver Island is so much fun to explore anyway, that adding geocaching into your travels just makes exploring it that much better and gives you another excuse to get out and see new places. More importantly, you can connect with other campers who share the love of the game and make new friends. Geocaching- it’s year round, all ages, good exercise and a great family adventure- check it out. Hope I meet you on Vancouver Island. Just watch out for Muggles!
--Scott Littlejohn is a new geocacher, passionate about Vancouver Island and his family’s park, Living Forest Oceanside Campground & RV, and can’t wait to hide his first cache! Scott, his wife and their dog, Ben, are no longer Muggles, and they’re OK with that. His travel blog is at Vancouver Island Touring.com
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