There's one in China that contains some batteries, along with a couple of American compact discs and a camera to record faces. There's one in Petra, Jordan, hidden near a lookout to an ancient castle known as the Habees Crusader Fort. There's even one in Scottsbluff, Neb., conveniently located in the Riverside Zoo, and searchers are urged to take in the zoo before finding it. They are all over world, with 147 caches that are hidden in Colorado alone. Anyone with a Global Positioning System device, the will to do a little hiking and a bit of an adventurous spirit can find one.
This is geocaching, a treasure-hunting-like sport that has blown up around the world. Literally thousands of caches, Tupperware containers holding a logbook and some trinkets, are hidden around the world somewhere and their GPS coordinates are put online at
www.geocaching.com
.
The idea is to go to the Web site to find the GPS coordinates of a cache and then look for it. The GPS device, which gives a global position to the user within six to 20 feet in terms of longitude and latitude, is used to guide the geocacher to the site. In recent years, these devices have become quite affordable.
Some caches are hidden in easy-to-find places; others will take a good hike into the woods and a smart nose to find.
When a cache is found, the geocacher should sign in the logbook, take and replace one of the trinkets, then go back to the Web site and record the find. Geocachers are urged to hide their own caches and put the information on the Web site for others to find.
Since the official Web site was created in July 2000, 193,580 caches have been hidden in 217 countries, including caches in every state in the United States.
"It's like a nice hike with a little added objective," Colorado geocacher Tony Seaver said.
Seaver's buddy, Peter Wich, from Alabama, turned him on to geocaching, recognizing that a cache was hidden in the Buffalo Pass area in Northwest Colorado. The two found the cache and decided to plant one of their own nearby at Fish Creek Falls, outside of Steamboat Springs, Colo.
"You might have to dig a little in the snow," Seaver said of the Fish Creek cache, but he suspected that it could be found in the winter. In other spots, winter caches can be hung in a tree or other off-the-ground spots.
Jeremy Ireland of Bellevue, Wash., is the geocaching guru who named the sport and operates the Web site. He explained that geocaching became possible on May 1, 2000, when the federal government unscrambled the signals of 24 positioning satellites, making it possible for GPS devices to be accurate within 30 feet.
Someone hid a cache near Portland, Ore., in celebration of the unscrambling. A man named Mike Teague was the first to find the cache and he created a Web site to tell people about it. The following July, Ireland found the site and his first cache and approached Teague about redoing the Web page and renaming the sport.
"I sort of thought of it as a sport that a unique type of people would do," Ireland said. "I really liked the idea of getting people outdoors."
Initially, Ireland, a thirty-someting Web designer, thought geocaching would catch on with computer-game fans because the concept was similar to adventure games.
But families are the demographic that has expanded the sport, he said.
Since becoming widely popular, geocachers have spawn additional activities. For example, some caches are "multi-caches," where the searcher is looking for numerous caches, each one a little more difficult than the next.
There also is something called a travel bug, which is a small device sometimes located in the cache. The travel bug can be tracked by satellite and comes with instructions on where it should be taken? like, "take me to all 50 states." The geocacher can choose to take the travel bug and drop it off at a location in accordance to the instruction.
Ireland said some state parks even support geocaching as a way to get people to come to recreation areas. Plus, Ireland recently launched the Cache in, Trash Out program, which encourages geocachers to carry a bag and pick trash during the search.
A couple years ago geocaching gained some Hollywood attention, being used in the promotion of the "Planet of the Apes" movie remake, Ireland said. Numerous prop archaeological caches, connected to the movie, were hidden all over the world with coordinates available on the Web site.
"I think it's going to branch out," he said of the future of geocaching. "I think it's going to get more complicated and more interesting."
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