Adventures in Geocaching
It was during an otherwise normal hike on a beautiful autumn day in Garland Park a few years ago that our family decided to rest for a minute right here:
It’s known as the homestead site, and was formerly the location of a shelter belonging to some of Carmel Valley’s early inhabitants. Today, very little remains except for the crumbled remnants of a brick hearth – barely visible near the center of the photo above - slowly succumbing to the native vegetation over many decades of neglect.
My kids started rooting around the area – I’m not telling exactly where, for reasons I’ll explain shortly - and it wasn’t long before they came across this unexpected find:
A metal ammunition can with a large “Official Geocache” sticker plastered across the face of it. They opened the can to discover a handful of small toys, trinkets, and an information sheet explaining that the cache we had stumbled upon was intentionally hid as a small piece in a vast network of similar outdoor treasures.
At the time, our family was what’s referred to as “muggles”: an absolutely perfect term snatched from the Harry Potter lexicon to describe everyday folks who are unaware of the secret identities and happenings of a much more interesting world that exists all around them. The good news was that unlike the rigid requirements for entering the wizarding world, anybody is welcome to join the world of geocaching at anytime. You don’t have to be born a geocacher; you simply have to sign up online and start playing.
So that’s exactly what we did. We did some Google searches to learn more about the activity, found the official geocaching website, made an investment in a nice handheld GPS (we chose this one from Amazon.com), and presto! Our family was transformed into a merry band of geocachers.
Ever since then, our hikes are more than hikes: they’re purpose-driven outings, either to discover as many caches as we can in one afternoon, or to reach some distant cache that gives our kids added incentive to get out and explore the great outdoors.
Our missions have taken us to the backs of deep canyons, to the base of hidden waterfalls, or – most frequently in our local exploits around Carmel Valley – to the top of a high ridgeline somewhere. These are places that our kids would enjoy exploring anyway, but sometimes the added motivation of searching for a small treasure box is just what they need to overcome the initial sense of “Why exactly are we doing this again?” inertia.
In fact, I’m convinced that if my kids thought there was a box of goodies awaiting them at the top, they’d will themselves up the peaks of the Himalayas.
Fortunately, they haven’t had to climb any extreme mountains yet, but they’ve enjoyed some pretty cool vistas, such as this one where they hunted down a geocache near the top of Soberanes Canyon in northern Big Sur.
So what exactly is a geocache? Until you find them, you never know for sure. Sometimes it’s a large ammo can full of stuff like the one pictured earlier …
… and sometimes it’s a micro canister tied to the small branches of a tree (look closely above) or nestled under a rock – places that appear completely innocuous unless you happen to know you should be looking for something there.
Most times, the containers are big enough to hold a handful of small items that can be traded and replaced. This is the main excitement for my two daughters, as they know to bring a knapsack full of toys with them to make exchanges at any container they find; each toy they take out is replaced by one from the bag, which probably came from another geocache anyway. Amusingly, most of the toys never make it out of the knapsack once we get home, but the thrill of getting something “new” is simply too much for them to resist.
Each container also has a sign-in sheet to record your visit, and to see the last time the cache was found as well as how many people have been there before. When you get home, you log the cache as “found”, and your profile is updated to show the total number that you’ve claimed since joining the website. Our family has about 150 caches logged; some users have bagged tens of thousands.
Geocaching is a global pastime, which creates some fun collateral aspects of discovering caches. Some users create their own designer coins indicating their place of origin, allowing other users to collect coins from geocachers in every state, or multiple countries, and so on. There are also “travel bugs” which are basically metal dogtags with a code printed on them; when you enter the code on the geocaching website, you can see all the locations that tag has visited. It’s not uncommon to find tags that have touched different continents before passing through your hands – especially here in coastal California, where foreign vacationers are plentiful and planes land after crossing the Pacific every day.
Sometimes you’ll find an item with a specific objective; for example, one day in the Sierras we found this little girl named Alicia, along with a note telling us that she started her journey in Florida. Alicia had a goal of reaching the Pacific Ocean, so we let her hitch a ride from us and eventually dropped her in a geocache off of Carmel Beach. Before we did, we posted this picture to the website, so her owner would know she made it:
Alicia looks happy, doesn’t she? Sometimes it’s so easy to make somebody’s day.
I’ve mentioned before how I’m a bit of a spy geek - and for me, that’s the coolest aspect of geocaching. One of the ground rules is that you’re supposed to keep all of your activities secret; if you’re hunting for a cache and some “muggles” happen to walk by, you pretend like you’re just hanging out and enjoying the beautiful day. Many of the caches are hidden in plain sight, and especially in urban areas, part of the challenge is to see if you can make a grab in a “high muggle” area without being detected.
After a while, this whole spy mentality changes the way you look at the world; everyday trees at the side of a trail like this aren’t just pretty scenery, they’re potential hiding places (yes, there’s one somewhere in the tree pictured above). Benches in the middle of a park aren’t just places to rest – their metal supports are great locations to hide small magnetic canisters. Gradually, you develop a “geocache sense” that helps you discern where a box might be hidden, even if you don’t have a GPS to give you the exact coordinates. (For what it’s worth, my wife is WAY better than me at this; maybe she’s the one who should have been a spy.)
On the rural trails we hike, muggle traffic isn’t such a huge issue, but you still have to look around a couple of times when your GPS is pointing you to a footbridge like this …
… to make sure nobody will come along to see your family snooping the heck out of it. I like to act as the lookout when everybody else is hunting, and the kids all know the drill: if I shout a warning, they quickly act like they’re just little busybodys burning youthful energy by bustling around the side of the trail. As soon as the coast is clear, they resume hunting high and low until they find the hidden cache.
If you’re wondering whether your family can start doing this stuff, trust me – it’s far easier than you think. No matter where you live, there are probably a ton of geocaches near you that are waiting to be discovered, and new ones are probably being added even as you read this. It’s one of those weird situations where the popularity of the activity will ultimately threaten its effectiveness – it’s hard to keep something a secret if everybody else already knows about it – but there’s still plenty of time to get in the game ahead of your muggle friends and neighbors. Registering on geocaching.com is almost completely effortless, and the site is extremely user friendly in the way you download, track, and log your caches.
For us, that autumn hike at Garland Park was a completely serendipitous occasion – because ever since stumbling upon it by accident, geocaching has become one of our family’s favorite activities to do together. There’s something in it for each of us – but perhaps the most important thing from my standpoint (yes, even more than the spy thing) is that it’s a great way for our kids to spend the day outside, indulging their sense of adventure, while steadily gaining an appreciation for the beauty of our surroundings and the abilities of their youthful bodies to explore them.
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