By Jessica Kerman
Bethany Wire, 17, was excited to find her first treasure on a geocaching quest.
“I was thinking, ‘If I were a geo-cache, where would I be?’ she reminisced. “I walk up to a tree, reach my hand in, and there it was!”
Wire has only partaken in geocaching with the Venture Crew club that hunts hidden treasures by using global positioning system devices.
But, she said, she enjoys the activity and hopes it will help with her future goals of becoming a wildlife preservation officer.
“It definitely helps with orienteering,” she said. “I’m not completely reliant on compasses, and I don’t have to look at a map all the time.”
As the hobby of geocaching becomes more popular, mostly compelled by a price reduction in GPS devices, more people have started hunting for hidden treasures throughout the world.
But the activity is about more than just finding a hidden prize.
“It’s fun,” says 15-year-old Matt Richardson, also in Venture Crew with Wire. “It’s a way to get outdoors and exercise.”
People who geocache live all over the world, and because of that, there are geocache sites everywhere. And while no young child should go unsupervised, the activity does bode well for families with children of all ages.
Karla Vaughn and her husband, Kevin, have gone on several outings with their boys Luke, 14, and Logan, 12.
“We’ve taken the kids and dropped them off, and then we went back out,” Karla Vaughn said referring to she and her husband.
The family started geocaching in July 2006.
“When we first started, my husband was off for two weeks, but we didn’t have the money to go on vacation,” she said. “So we just went geocaching every day.”
The activity is just great for the family, Karla Vaughn said, because it is something they can do together, and it allows everyone to hone skills that would go unused otherwise.
“Logan can spot stuff, especially when no one else can find it,” she said. “Luke can scurry up and get up in trees and stuff.”
Geocaching isn’t just going to a location and immediately finding a big box filled with goodies. It’s much trickier than that. A cache is often hidden very well, and some have yet to be found.
“It’s sometimes so right in front of you that you miss it,” Daniel Banks said.
Banks, along with two co-workers at Ontario Systems in Muncie, goes geocaching during his lunch break almost daily.
He can never be caught without his GPS and a microcache, which is a 2-inch container that can be hidden almost anywhere.
“I like finding places I wouldn’t normally look for,” co-worker Tom Manis said. “I like the ones that have a little trek to them.”
To find a site, cachers go to www.geocaching.com, where they look up an area and find coordinates of caches in the area.
Cachers log those coordinates into a GPS device and set off to find the site. Sometimes the name of the cache can be used as a clue to find it, and sometimes clues are included in the description of the cache.
“There’s a lot of puzzle caches,” Banks said. “Sometimes they use a Jefferson cipher or they’ll include it in the source code of a Web page. Some people are devious on puzzle caches.”
And there’s a sense of glory when you find a puzzle cache, Banks said.
“It’s a little elitist to add your name to the list.”
Cachers often have nicknames also. For example, Banks is known as “Wabash Banks” in the geocaching world.
The activity gets more complex as more people get involved. Some caches have geobugs, which track where they are, and the owners request the cache go to specific places.
“I have a geobug that wants to go to Boy Scout camps,” said Bradley Alcoe, 15 and member of the Venture Crew’s Anderson Unit 208. “You can request it to go somewhere and then come back.”
Alcoe, his twin sister Ashley and his parents often go geocaching together.
“It’s a good family activity,” Ashley said.
The activity not only is fun, but it also serves as an environmental program.
“Wherever you go, and whatever you do, if you see trash, you pick it up,” Bradley Alcoe said.
As the cacher’s code decrees, “Cache in, trash out.”
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In geocaching, a kind of serialized game and treasure hunt, hunters of the rural and urban kind use the Global Positioning System receivers to locate containers (called caches) in woods, on the back of buildings, about anywhere. Participants get a list of sites off the Internet, and then use GPS to find them. Most times, there’s trinkets in the caches which geocachers can take if they leave something in exchange, providing a treasure for the next person.
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Interested in trying it out?
-Mounds State Park
-1 to 3 p.m. Saturday
The park will also have a history hike at 11 a.m.
Cost: $3 per person or $10 per team
Cachers must have their own GPS devices.
Dress for the weather.
Questions: Call Mounds State Park Nature Center (765) 649-8128
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GPS Devices:
Garmin eTrex H Handheld GPS:
Wal-Mart: $86.88
Radio Shack: $109.99
BestBuy.com: $99.99
Amazon.com: range from $87.76 to $160.17
Garmin GPSMap 60CSx GPS:
Wal-Mart: $305
RadioShack.com: $404.99
Best Buy: $399.99
Amazon.com: range from $299.89 to $499.99
Magellan eXplorist 500 LE Hiking Portable Navigator:
Wal-Mart: $299.99
Best Buy: $199.99
Polar RS800G3 Multisport GPS Computer:
Wal-Mart: $469.95
Amazon.com: $469.95
