Posted on 08/03/2005 7:45:29 AM PDT by Our_Man_In_Gough_Island
In the Midwestern state of Wisconsin there's a new game in town. It's called Geocaching. The object of this game is to find an object - and perhaps replace it with another. This report is narrated by Crystal Park.
People around the world are taking part in an ongoing high tech scavenger hunt. It's a new thing called Geocaching. There are Internet sites that list the latitude and longitude coordinates of where things are stashed.
People with Global Positioning Satellite, or GPS, units use that information to try to hunt down what they're looking for.
John Carvin GPS units are accurate to about 4.5 to 9 meters, so sometimes the objects are small, according to John Carvin, a member of the Wisconsin Geocaching Association. He says, "There's traditional caches, which is a box, which is similar to what you found. There's micro caches which are pretty interesting to find, hard to find because they're small like a 35mm film canister"
Rhonda Veroeven says she found one the size of an aspirin.
Rhonda is vice president of the Geocaching Association. "Your first one is always memorable but the more challenging ones tends to be ones we have fondest memories of. There's something about finding something hidden, that's pretty exciting."
Geocaching seems to be catching on. In the Madison, Wisconsin area, for example, there are more than 400 hidden caches.
E-mail This Article
The attraction of geocaching is the experience of bushwhacking through a variety of habitats and terrain. The most successful cache-masters locate their cache via a surprising use of terrain, such as in a sand-blowout in an otherwise heavily forested area.
We geocache. I highly recommend it for seeing places you would never know existed. Great fun!
There is something so, I don't know, "Old Hippy" about this game. I guess when your joints get too stiff for hacky sack . . .
I have seen geocaches with disposable cameras in them. The owner of the cache recovers the camera and posts the pictures.
A cache was located under a bridge of I-15 within 200 feet of Hill AFB gate (UTAH) and caused a terrorist alert. Kind of a dumb place to put one.
Geocacheing is a great way to spend a day for a family. If you get lucky, you might meet other geocachers.
I intend to try this once I get a receiver, good way to get outdoors too.
Here's one site, I'm sure there's others.
http://www.geocaching.com/
My family enjoys geocaching. My five-year-old likes trading old matchboxes for new matchboxes, and hunting in stumps and whatnot. We all enjoy a walk. And, as someone else already said, it gets us to places we didn't know existed. When we travel, we always look up the caches in the area, and hunting them usually gets us to the best parks, with the best views, or to the best hiking trails. It's better than a travel guide.
I don't geocache, but I do letterbox. It's a fun way to goad myself into some exercise. And my 6 year old son thinks it's a hoot.
We have been to the neatest places within miles of our home we didn't know existed. My neatest one was Pillsbury crossing. It is a low water natural bridge across a creek. There is a log cabin just down the road and a pioneer school just down the road from the cabin. All three were on back roads we had no idea were there. Great stuff!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.