The amazing geocaching race
Go online to get outside and hunt for buried treasure
by Allan Britnell
Roughly once a week for the past five years, Heather Bayer has taken her GPS unit with her when heading out the door. It’s not that she’s afraid of getting lost. She’s addicted to geocaching.
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What is geocaching?
Geocaching is often described as a high-tech treasure hunt. To play, all you need is a portable GPS (they start at about $100) and the coordinates to some nearby caches. Caches are buried packages that you search for. They’re downloaded from any of several geocaching web sites (see Communities).
“Wherever we go, we take the GPS,” says Heather Bayer, geocaching enthusiast and founder of Cottage Caching. Geocaching gives her a chance to take the dogs for a walk. “It gets us going to different places each time, rather than [always taking] the same old walk,” she says. “You see a lot more of the countryside than you normally would.”
Bayer even takes her GPS — and a list of pre-loaded cache locations — on vacation.
There are hundreds of thousands of individual caches to be found in dozens of countries around the world. Even in Antarctica.
Getting started
Most geocaching sites offer free basic access. Once registered, you can search for caches by country, by province or even within a set distance from your home. If it’s an established cache, the posted comments from prior visitors often provide helpful clues or describe scenic highlights en route.
Once at the location, players search for a hidden, weatherproof container usually filled with small trinkets. Back at home, participants log back onto the web site to record their find(s) and seek out their next adventure.
Creating your own cache is easy. Stock a weatherproof container with a notebook and some low-cost items, hide it — semi-buried under brush in the woods is a popular choice — and then record the GPS coordinates on a geocaching web site.
Before planting your cache, make sure it’s clearly marked. (You can buy official geocaching stickers.) There have been instances — including one in Ottawa in 2008 - when caches have been investigated and even blown up by the police bomb squad.
Rules of the road
At the top of geocaching’s well-established rules and etiquette is a respect for public and private property. Another one is “cache in, trash out,” says Bayer. “If you’re going to a cache, you usually take a garbage bag and pick up any trash that is around it.”
People typically leave small, low-cost trinkets inside a cache container. If you find something you’d like to keep, leave something else — of roughly the same value — in its place.
Caches also contain a logbook (and sometimes even a camera) for finders to identify themselves and leave a short note.
Be sure to revisit the web site that cache was registered on to let the owner know you found it.
Family fun
“We find geocaching is very popular with people with kids who want to get out and do something as a family,” says George Valentine. He is chief operating officer of Calgary-based retailer GPS Central.
His two young children get a kick out of exchanging items they find in the cache, but for dad it’s all about getting away from the TV and computers. “We visit places you would never see otherwise.”
Bayer’s four adult kids enjoy geocaching, and her enthusiasm has spread to the rest of the family. Her sister and brother-in-law often host their young grandchildren at the cottage. “My sister says there’s nothing so fine as watching her husband leading off with the GPS and this little trail of five children following behind.”
