What is Geocaching Anyway?

My friend Gabbi asked the best question yesterday--one that had entered my thoughts many times before this week, but had never really been answered in a way I understood.

So what is geocaching anyway?

I felt it was a bit mysterious. Like some secret club where members used a secret language to keep others in the dark. Waypoints and caches and coordinates...bah! What does it all mean??

Turns out, it just took me getting a cell phone and my butt out of the computer chair (and a friend with the same interest) to figure it out.

But what does a cell phone have to do with it, you ask?

The main idea of geocaching is finding your way to a particular spot on the earth. How do you get to that spot on the earth? You could be Indiana Jones or my dad and just hack your way there with a compass and a toothpick. OR, you can use a GPS device. (I recommend option two.) My cell phone is GPS enabled (Blackberry Curve 8330) but you can also buy a handheld GPS device that is designed for this very activity (my friend Elaine, who went with me has one of these).

Now, my phone wasn't sitting there saying, "Hey let's go geocaching, because I know how!" I had to convince it that it was really a GPS receiver. I went to App World and downloaded a free application for my phone (there are many to choose from) called Black Star. The app lets my phone connect with satellites and gives me all the basic info I need to know where I am on the earth. My coordinates, for example. It also tells me how fast I'm moving, how many miles or feet until I reach my destination, and how far I've traveled. It also can show me a digital compass with an arrow telling me "Go THAT way!" to reach my destination.

But what is my destination?

That was my next thought. How do I find out where these secret caches are? What's the point of it all anyway? What's a cache??

I went to geocaching.com to find out. This website (and others like it) holds the key to getting started.

A person or an organization (called the owner) takes a waterproof box (often an old ammo can) and hides it somewhere in the world where others can find it (on public property--it won't be in your neighbor's hose box). The box contains a notebook for finders to write in and little treasures. The treaures can be toys, buttons, books, crafts--something that has meaning to the person who left it, but little monetary value. If you take something out, you put something in.

One thing we took out was a travel bug. It's like a little dog tag that can be looked up online using it's unique number. The one we found had been traveling since 2006 and had gone over 3,000 miles from cache to cache. We will be moving it to another cache to keep it on the journey.


But I digress.

So where are these things anyway? On geocaching.com there are lists bursting at the seams of places where caches have been placed. Each listing gives you a waypoint or, coordinates for a starting or ending place to find the cache. It also gives you clues, like, "Once you reach the waypoint, turn north and look for the ammo can under a fallen tree."

I used my GPS to tell me where I was. My coordinates. Then (how cool is this) I clicked on Find Nearest Caches on Geocaching.com. This enabled me to see the list of nearby caches. I could have just entered the coordinates by hand into my GPS and started walking and following the arrow point. But the great tech advantage of this is you can just download the file directly into the app.

So I downloaded one called "Tallahassee's First" as I was standing on the playground at Tom Brown Park. The GPS showed that it was 1 mile away and the red arrow pointed THAT WAY. The clues told us to start at the trailhead by the playground, giving us the coordinates for that spot (or waypoint) also.

We started walking. (That's Jeremy, Noodle, Me staring at my phone, and Hopers showing off a pretty leaf she found.)

My friend's handheld GPS receiver was quite fancy. Her red arrow was laid over a topographical map rather than a compass like mine. We could see that the endpoint was near the lake and the railroad tracks.

Some caches are easy, some are more difficult. Websites rate them as such. This one wasn't too bad, but we did have to venture off the trail through poison ivy infested woods to find it.

Yay! This kids went instantly from whiny mode to overjoyed mode when we pulled the box out.

Another cache we searched for wasn't so easy. We knew it was somewhere around this sink hole, but we just couldn't find it!!


It didn't help matters that I and my girls were wearing sandals and flip flops. Not the best attire choice for hiking around in the woods.

Ha ha! The challenge! Next time... I'll get you my pretty, and your little cache too!

It's a fun game.

Go try it.