Geocaching – Take 2 (and 3)

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A co-worker and I walked to lunch Thursday and, as I’d recorded some nearby geocaches, we decided to walk to the nearest, which wasn’t far from the restaurant.

The location of the first was easy to locate, but the cache itself eluded us. It seemed so unlikely that we couldn’t see it that it must have been removed or missing. We decided to try the next nearest. It was a brisk walk given the time constraints of our lunch hour, and, once again, the location seemed obvious, but the cache itself eluded us.

In all honesty, I really didn’t spend a whole lot of time familiarizing myself with the whole geocaching phenomena, and so I really just didn’t have a clue what to expect.

Today, we knew that rain was coming, but before it arrived, we decided to go out to one of the mountain parks with the kids to walk around. Just before we left, I hopped onto geocaching.com and downloaded about 5 cache locations in that area.

The first was only 0.2 of a mile from the car, and we immediately zeroed in on the area. In was in a mountain park in which many of the off-trail areas are designated closed. GPS signals are somewhat imprecise but the location was clearly off the trail. While the area wasn’t explicitly marked as “off-limits”, it could reasonably be inferred, but I decided to look anyway.

After a few minutes fruitless searching, including around a particularly promising dead tree, a group of people were approaching. Rather than get caught, I decided to move onto the next cache.

The next one was only 0.3 of a mile away. It was located – or so the coordinates would seem to indicate – up a slight hill along the side of some freeway fencing. The hill side was covered with loose rocks, and we searched up and down looking for a cairn or other marker that would locate the cache, but again we just couldn’t find it. We didn’t know what we were looking for.

This time I wasn’t going to give up so easily, but then, those same four people who had come upon us at the last cache location arrived where we were. Then I realized what was happening, as they swept across the hill, GPS units in their hands. They looking like a Star Trek landing party, tricorders scanning for lifeforms. They were geocachers on the same hunt as us.

Introductions were made and, within 30 seconds of their arrival, one of them had spotted the cache. It was a small carabiner with a screw-top end that had just enough room for a small piece of paper to be rolled up and tucked inside: The log.

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Although, certainly I never would have found it, I signed the log anyway. I was there when it was discovered.

We spoke for a while, and they gave me several pointers. They had a print out of the geocaching page which showed various details like difficulty of the hiding place, size of the container and other pieces of useful information. They also told me that they (as two different teams) had found over 2,000 and 1,200 caches each! All over the world.

They also confirmed my suspicion that the old dead tree was the hiding place for the previous one we hadn’t found, so we went back and found it. It was easy when we knew where it had to be, so we set off for a third cache.

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This one was half a mile away and, once I’d homed in on it, was easy to find. I helped that this one was a large tupperware container. Nonetheless, this was my first completely unassisted find. It was interesting that this cache was in sight of one of my favorite shooting locations for Fusion Patrol. We used this exact area to tape “Eli Whitney’s Wooly World” – a take off on Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, and Spottings – a rip on Sightings.

The rain was coming and James had reached the end of his hiking, so we called it quits for the day. The kids seemed to enjoy it and it was a pleasant way to take aimless wandering and make it seem more purposeful.

Now I’ll have to go back and find those two by my office.

Note: I’ve been intentionally vague about where these caches are so as to not provide spoilers to someone who might go looking for them.

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