Real Life Treasure Hunting: Geocaching

December 29, 2008 2:00 am Sir Haxington Games for Fun, Gaming

I’ve always wanted to get into geocaching since I heard about it years ago. If you’ve never heard of geocaching the premise is simple – people hide stuff out in the real world, and other people try and find it. Sounds easy, but once you start throwing stuff like puzzles, encryption / decryption, nano and microcaches and muggles, the hunt becomes much more challenging and interesting.

A perfect storm occurred in order to get me hooked on geocaching. Like I said, I had always wanted to do it, but you really need a GPS device to go hunting for caches. Luckily, I recently got a iPhone with GPS hotness. The Appstore happened to have a holiday sale going on for the Geocaching.com app ($3, down from $10), which helps you find nearby caches to your location, shows them on Google maps, and so on. I was at my sisters place in Oregon visiting, and my brother in law had taken my niece geocaching a few times and wanted to go again. We were bored, and there happened to be a few within walking distance, so it was on.

The first one was around a tenth of a mile away, near a stump under some piled up bark, in a greenway near my sister’s house. The Tupperware container was filled with all kinds of neat stuff – some kids toys, a butterfly pin, stickers and of course the log book. All geocaches are supposed to contain a logbook so that people can sign that they’ve discovered them. I’ve been going by “sirhaxington”, which is also my geocaching.com name. After taking the butterfly pin and adding a magnifying glass we were off to find our second cache.

The second cache was a “microcache” (just a tiny cache that usually doesn’t involve adding or taking items) and involved solving a riddle that took us an hour to figure out the night before. The hint online was a coded message, but ended up being the numbers you’d enter on a phone to make a text message. The numbers, when decoded spelled out the exact latitude and longitude to find the cache. We walked to it and after a few minutes of searching found a medicine bottle strung up in a tree with fishing line. The bottle was covered in electricians tape for camouflage. My nephew took a metal rose pin out and we added a spinner blade from a fishing lure. We signed the log and headed home.

Not all the hunts go so well. Later that night we for dinner, and there was a rather complex geocache nearby involving a puzzle that had us walking around a neighborhood, adding together addresses of houses, dates on placards found in a park and so on. Eventually we solved the puzzle and found where we needed to go but it was getting dark. There were seven of us searching around a public park in bushes with cellphones and flashlights, but we couldn’t find the cache. We spent about an hour searching, but only came up with an empty car of peanut butter and someone’s discarded, molding jacket.

The feeling of defeat bothered me all night. It felt a lot like when you get to a really difficult part of a game, die twenty times and shut the console off in frustration. I ended up going over to my other sisters house around 7:30 that night and decided we would find some caches near her joint to make up for it. The end result was an almost exact replica of the earlier excursions – the first one was a large and remote find, the second was a microcache and the third we couldn’t find.

So, four out of six so far. The biggest lessons I’ve learned so far is that you should always bring a pen, in case the cache doesn’t have one (lots of microcaches don’t). Also 7-11’s in downtown Portland don’t sell pens, but instead offer unsharpened pencils as far as writing implements go. Also, when I inevitably start hiding my own caches (how can I resist? I love hiding Easter eggs in games so geocaching is the perfect hobby for me), I’ll never put one in a place that would make people hate looking for them. One cache we couldn’t find was apparently near a garbage can in downtown Portland, not the kind of place anyone wants to touch and search around.

I sorta wish I would have started geocaching sooner so I could have caches in Los Angeles, but I’ll end up finding a bunch (and hiding a bunch) in the Seattle area for sure. I can’t want!

Oh, and muggles are the people that don’t know about geocaching. Don’t let them catch you in the act, a geocacher should never let a muggle discover their treasure!