Bought a GPS and found a geocache today. Those little units are amazing at what they will do. The unit put me less than 3 feet from the cache. I found out there are several caches hidden in the area where I live so just another excuse to go into the mountains. (as if I needed one)

Anyone else tried geocaching??? Give it a try.

 

Search geocache and you'll see a good number of people who participate.
I've just done it twice (same day) but I can say that it was pretty fun.

Thanks for the reminder though... I was thinking about something to do with some friends.

 

Yeup... for a couple of years now.

My kids were just out visiting and we hid a couple of caches. Come find 'em!

 

Never heard of it, I think I'll give it a try.

Thanks!!

 

There's a lot of information about it on the 'net, but the root of it all is here:

http://www.geocaching.com

 

Thats the site that I found/Bookmarked.

There are many around my area. I think my son will get as much of a kick out of it as I will.

 

I try to hit a few caches on every desert wheeling trip. Great way to get out off the main roads and see some areas that only the locals know:

http://c-67-170-224-64.client.comcas...DeathValley10/

 

What do you guys typically find in these spots? Isn't the deal to take something/leave something?

 

Find wise, it's usually trinkets, nothing really of value... though sometimes people like leaving AA batteries so you can reload your GPS. The fun comes from the challenge to find the cache, not what's in the cache.You may have the Lat/Lon of a box, but getting there isn't as easy as it may seem.

Leaving something is appropiate if you take something. When I go out I have a bag of misc. stuff, usually stuff from a dollar store. Like bottle toppers, stickers, figurines, etc. No food (including gum and wrapped candy). Animals will show up and pillage the cache.

One of the things that folks do is to leave "travel bugs". This is a small serialized medalion which the "leaver" has a purpose for. It's usually to move from here to there - and there could be across town, across the country or across the world. So, if you find a cache on GeoCaching.com that has a travel bug in it, then yoou look up the number of the bug and it'll tell you the start point/end point. If you can help move the bug along, then you head to the cache and pick it up.

For example, say someone's trying to get a bug from Alaska to New York. You see that it's in a cache in Bellevue and you're going on a trip to Denver next week. So, you might head to the cache, get the bug, and pack it and your GPS on the trip to Denver. When you get to Denver find a local cache, drop off the bug and update the tracking database with the new location.

You just helped the bug get to it's end point.


Last year I dropped a bug in a local cache and earmarked it for my kids in the Chicago area. It took about two months to get there, but it made it! That was cool. The kids still have the bug and the little figurine that was attached to it.

 

Yes, all manner of things or nothing at all. Some caches are virtual, that is you just find the loction and its either a neat view, top of a mountain or in some cases just the intersection of a latitude and a longitude line in the middle of nowhere.

One cache I did was a micro-cache, inside a film cannister, a small roll of paper with a list of Roosevelt dime years and one dime. The idea was to take the dime and leave one that had not already been crossed off on the list, then cross off that year. Others have have the travel bugs, as mentioned, I did one that was an alligator and was trying to get to the Nile River in Egypt for a swim with his brothers!