Geocaching

Andy received a new GPS (Global Positioning System) unit for Christmas this year. So he and I had a lot of fun geocaching. Huh, you say? A grown up treasure hunt, if you will. There are thousands of participants in this world wide game and thousands of more geocaches. Participants hide a cache, provide clues and coordinates on a website, and players use their GPS units to navigate to the treasure. To prove you found it, you sign a logbook contained in the cache, sometimes as small as a 35 mm film cartridge. The whole object is to have fun, hiking and seeing interesting sites, urban and in the wild. Some of these are hidden in very creative locations; some are hidden in down-right impossible to find locations by obviously devious minds. The geocache we were looking for in the picture above was a real doozy! The initial coordinates took us to a state historical marker here in town where we obtained information and had to use a deciphering key to find the next coordinates. It took us a couple of days to break the code. Then we hiked a mile and a half into some state forest lands to the site. The hemlock grove blocked our satellite views and severely reduced our GPS accuracy. We spent 3 hours looking for the cache and finally had to leave to make it out before dark. Andy emailed the guy that night to get some clues and went back to finally find it the next day.