Geocaching
Sunday, February 17th 2008 · My Life
On a suggestion from my mother and stepfather, who are visiting right now, we took a trip earlier today to Tunnel Drive for a walk and to hunt down a geocache there called Tunnel Scramble.
I've never been geocaching before. It's a game that's come about as the result of GPS technology. You find the coordinates of a cache online and use a GPS unit to track it down. This one was up a trail on Tunnel Drive.
After going back and forth on the trail a few times, we determined that the cache must be up a steep inline to our right. We'd gone partway up on our first pass, but decided it was too steep and initially ruled it out as a possibility. But after going a half mile past it, we realized it was the only possible path that would lead to the blip on the GPS unit that was the cache.
It was a rough climb - there was lots of loose rock that would shift under your feet and big stones that you had to climb up with two hands. Both Paul and myself scraped our hands on rocks to the point that we were bleeding. My mom and myself ended up with sizable cactus spines embedded in our skin. When I tried to pull one out of my finger, it wanted to pull most of my skin off along with the spine.
Eventually, we got to a point where it looked like we were passing the cache. Our path on the GPS map looked like spaghetti as we circled, looking behind tree and up a steep cliff face for the cache. Then Paul spotted it beneath a big stone, partially buried.
We got pictures of my mom, Paul, and myself with the cache. It had a bunch of stupid little trinkets inside, and a notepad on which we left our names and a matchbook from a restaurant in Connecticut.
All in all, it was the thrill of actually finding the thing out in the middle of nowhere that made it all worth it. I think I'll try Geocaching again sometime.
In Letterboxing, people post clues on how to find the letterbox. Many clues can be found online today, but clues to more exclusive letterboxes are still passed by word of mouth. Formal letterboxes usually have ink stamps where you can copy your stamp into their log and their stamp into yours.
From what I've heard, Geocaching is pretty much the same thing as Letterboxing except you're given a location to find using a GPS rather than clues. There may be other key differences also, since I didn't hear you mention a stamp (unless that was one of the 'stupid little trinkets').
Anyway, Sounds like fun... I had a chance to go letterboxing a few years ago, but I wasn't too keen on hiking miles into the woods looking for a hidden container which might no longer be there.