Geocaching, All Grown Up and Roped In
By J.D. Dooley
Geocaching, one of the fastest-growing outdoor sports, combines high-tech savvy with the excitement of a treasure hunt.
Lynn and Abby Willis start at the base of the 130-foot cliff at Little Lost Cove cliffs in the Pisgah National Forest. The 5.6-rated route, known as The Buttress, is one that the couple established a few years earlier.
They rope in and begin by climbing up to a handlebar hold, then traverse up and right about 20 feet to get established on the Buttress proper. The Buttress climb goes straight up before pulling over a small cap roof with big holds. They then make their way up and left of a long horizontal roof, and establish a belay from the pine trees near the top.
Then Abby pulls out a small handheld GPS, hikes about 40 yards west to a small boulder, and seeks out a hidden Altoids container covered in stickers. Inside is a collection of unusual beer caps. Officially, the container is the geocache known as “Kind Brew.”
Living near Boone, N.C., Lynn and Abby are climbers. Rock, ice, boulders—you name it. But when Abby discovered geocaching, the couple merged climbing and geocaching into what is becoming its own high-tech outdoor adventure sport.
“Hiding the Kind Brew cache was a spontaneous thought one day when we were trying to decide if we wanted to go climbing or geocaching,” Lynn says. “So why not do both?
“We got our climbing gear together and began looking around the house for something cool to hide. We found an empty Altoids container and covered it with stickers, then sifted through the beer bottle caps that drop into an empty climber’s chalkbag under my wall-mounted bottle opener. That’s when we decided to climb Little Lost Cove Cliffs with the cache and then place it under a summit boulder.”
It’s not easy to get to, but the view from the top of Little Lost Cove is considered to be among the best in Pisgah National Forest. Finding the geocache is like icing on the cake.
The contents of "Kind Brew"
If you are unfamiliar with geocaching, here’s how it works. The sponsor of a cache places a weather-proof container in an area hidden from sight. Then clues, along with the latitude and longitude of the site, are provided so others with handheld GPS units may search for the cache. Typically, a cache will contain trinkets available for trade. The entire geocaching community operates on an honor-based “take something, leave something” principle. When a cache is located, the finder signs the logbook within and trades for an item in the cache.
Geocaching may have started with a few tech-savvy adventurers with handheld GPS units running around hiding treasure boxes from each other, but it has turned into a worldwide phenomenon with participants crossing all cultural boundaries. From grandpas in city parks to cruise ship passengers disembarking in the Virgin Islands to backpackers along the Appalachian Trail, geocaching appeals to a large cross-section of the public. It’s a mini-treasure hunt available to anyone with a GPS, almost anywhere on the globe.
The primary clearinghouse for geocaches is Geocaching.com. Most notable caches are listed there, and once a geocacher becomes a member (basic membership is free), he or she may log on and browse the caches, as well as keep a tally of his or her hidden and found caches. Want to get a quick look at the caches in your area? Just go to Geocaching.com and enter your ZIP code in the search field at the top of the screen. The results may astound you.
According to Geocaching.com, there are 473,064 active caches worldwide. During the second week of October 2007, there were 305,727 new geocache log entries, written by 45,041 geocachers.
Traditional caches are stored in military ammo boxes, Tupperware containers, and other waterproof container They are then placed in public areas with permission from the land managers or on private property with permission of the landowners. Along with traditional caches, Geocaching.com also lists many other kinds:
- Multi-caches involve two or more locations, the final location being the site of the actual find.
- Mystery caches often involve complicated puzzles that you first must solve to determine cache coordinates, and may contain multiple stages and virtual caches, which exist in the form of locations.
- Virtual caches often appear in places where traditional caches are forbidden. To log a virtual cache, you must make your way to a particular location, where you may be required to take a photo of yourself or provide the answer to a question that can only be found by visiting the correct location. A virtual cache is usually in an out-of-the-ordinary location.
- Benchmarks are geodetic survey markers that have been placed across the country, some dating back 200 years. Benchmarks are often in remote, hard-to-get-to places and searching for them has become a separate pursuit.
The Willises also enjoy mountaineering, and about once a year, they jump on a plane and fly out West to the Tetons, Sierras, Cascades or Rockies. When they traveled to Colorado to climb Longs Peak, a technical 14,200-footer, they planned a week of taking it easy with Lynn’s sister in Lakewood, Colo. They checked Geocaching.com and found the Bear Creek Trail cache less than 100 feet from her residence.
After acclimatizing at altitude, the couple headed to Rocky Mountains National Park and summited Longs Peak, in early winter conditions, where a virtual cache is logged above 14,000 feet.
The great benefit of geocaching is that there are caches suited to almost anyone’s adventure preference. There are urban caches in all major metropolitan areas, as well as suburban caches scattered throughout easily accessible parks and recreation areas. Then there are extreme caches on mountain summits and on the seabed.
Bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and outdoor activities, geocaching also provides opportunities to engage others in outdoor experiences that otherwise might not interest them. That’s why Geocaching.com calls it the sport “where you are the search engine.”
J.D. Dooley is a freelance writer and photographer living near Boone, N.C. He is a veteran news journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, and the Miami Herald.
Posted on November 19, 2007