Oxford University students Anne Osborne, Marcus Badger,
Beth Shaw, and Julia Cartwright examine a geocache near
Lunar Crater volcanic field in Nevada. |
My introduction to geocaching was a search
for the "Long Tube." At a rally last winter in Quartzsite,
Arizona, friends Pam and Steve Ritchie taught a class on Global
Positioning Satellite (GPS) devices and introduced us to the
adventure of hunting for geocaches.
After an introductory lesson, we entered
the coordinates of our start location and the cache into our
GPS devices, then caravanned to the Fisherman
Intaglio, an archaeological site featuring several large
geoglyphs etched into the desert floor near the Colorado River.
After parking, we set off on a short walk across the desert
to the coordinates. A GPS device only gets you within 10-20
feet so we then had to look for the cache.
Once we'd spotted it, we carefully removed
the PVC tube from its hiding place and looked inside. Ours
contained a logbook and several small dollar-store-type items.
According to geocaching rules:
- Take an item
- Leave another in its place
- Write about it in the log book (or TNLN
for "took nothing, left nothing")
- Return the cache to the exact position
and coordinates where it was found.
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On our return, we enjoyed a side
benefit of geocaching -- exploring the nearby area. The Fisherman
Intaglio archaeological site is fascinating to visit.
GETTING STARTED
Begin by looking at Geocaching.com,
which has pages on how geocaching works and listings of caches.
Geocaches can be found hidden all over the world, in every
type of environment, from easy to difficult to access and
find. Geocaching doesn't require a fancy GPS unit, though
some features are more suited to the sport. Click
here for helpful suggestion from GPS manufacturer Garmin.
Another site with lots of good information is GPS
Practice & Fun.
Added Fun! As the sport of geocaching
grows, twists and contests add fun. You might find a "travel
bug," a trackable tag which you carry to another cache.
These hitchhikers have their own Web sites and often have
a task, such as traveling to another country. Other twists
include searching for NGS benchmarks (metal markers placed
across the U. S. by the National Geographic Survey) and organized
challenges like CacheAcrossAmerica.
GPS manufacturer Magellan
is sponsoring the "Cache Her If You Can" contest
in summer 2004.
Sensitive Lands: Many government
agencies and geocachers are concerned about the negative impact
the sport can have on cultural sites and the environment.
Debate is ongoing at geocaching discussion groups. Certain
areas, including U.S. national parks, are off limits to caches.
Any historical site, archaeological site, or location where
human traffic could disturb endangered wildlife or plants
should be avoided. Some people advocate moving a cache once
a year to prevent a path from being worn to its location.
On the other hand, several state
park systems including West
Virginia State Parks list caches in their parks.
For many, the biggest reward of geocaching
is the thrill of the search and the discovery of a place that
they have never been. Geocaching dovetails nicely with the
RV lifestyle. One RV couple recently found their 1,138th geocache
and along with it a beautiful, free Forest Service campground.
Life is good!
Jaimie
Hall
8/1/04
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Alice
Zyetz and Jaimie Hall have
been RVing fulltime with their husbands
for more than ten years each. Together
they have published two books on the
RV Lifestyle: