What is Geocaching?

 
Some of the topics I cover on my blog focuses on geocaching and the places it takes me to, but for the uninitiated, you might be wondering: “What the fig is geocaching??!?”

Say no more. Geocaching is the sport of finding hidden containers called geocaches, which are placed in a variety of locations around the world and are discovered with the use of a GPS device. Geocaches come in many shapes and sizes, and at minimum contain a logbook so geocachers can log their find, while larger caches often contain other items and goodies that can either be traded or moved to another cache. There are currently over a million geocaches in existence today, and they can be found almost anywhere (even in Antarctica.)

If this piques your interest, you can learn more on how to get started by visiting the official Geocaching.com site and checking out their Getting Started section.

As for me, I first discovered the hobby after I bought my first ever GPS unit to use for my car, and one of the features it offered was the ability to download and store files relating to geocaching. Not knowing what that was at the time, I looked it up on Wikipedia to learn more. I was intrigued by the idea, and decided to hunt for my first geocache as soon as the weekend came. My first successful cache hunt brought me to a little known garden and boardwalk near the South Street Seaport (in Manhattan), which provided a splendid view of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. When I found the cache, I realized the importance of why it had been placed here too. The garden provided a small little respite from the busyness of the city that I never would have found otherwise. Geocaching was opening up a whole new world to me.

After logging a few dozen more finds, I began to realize geocaching was about more than simply finding a tupperware container in the woods:

It made me a real life Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones had always been one of my favorite characters ever, and while I grew up I would imagine myself fighting off Nazis and bad guys as I went off on my next quest to find a valuable artifact and save the world. Of course, geocaching doesn’t offer anything nearly as dramatic (at least not yet), but there’s a reason why I keep hearing the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme playing in my head every time I go off into the jungle in my search for the next cache.

A geocache I found in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, hidden under an old covered bridge.

It made me a better explorer

Traveling and exploring the world are one of my biggest passions, but it had been nullified over the years by a certain lack of direction. Mostly I would simply wind up driving around aimlessly without any real purpose, only to realize all I managed to accomplish was to waste gas revisiting my usual haunts. I had tried to explore the great outdoors a handful of times too, only to be turned off by all the pointless hiking that seemed to get me nowhere.

Geocaching however gave me a chance to explore the world in a way I never could before. I now had a sense of direction and could discover new and exotic places that never would have occurred to me to look for otherwise. It gave me the focus I needed to become a far better explorer, at long last reigniting my dormant passions. I never would have thought I’d be hiking again, but now I do it all the time.

Wandering but no longer lost: A geocaching hunt takes me through a wintry wonderland.

It takes me back in time

Many owners of geocaches are also history buffs, and the locations where they place their caches often have significant meaning either to them or to the rest of the world, or both. I found caches at abandoned railroad stations, ancient school houses, near the remains of famous historical sites and many other places as well, even leading me to the grave sites of some very famous people. Some caches are not actually caches, but are considered virtual, meaning the goal is to find a specific landmark rather than a container (such virtual hunts are now classified as Waymarking.) There are even caches that are called “earth caches,” which are geological formations you can search for and explore. Most of these kinds of caches are designed to take you back into the past, to see and experience what once was.

Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan. George Washington once gave an emotional farewell to his officers at this very tavern in 1783.

It made me a better writter/blogger

For the longest time, my writing always seemed to suffer from a lack of focus. I wanted to tell a story, but I didn’t live much of a life to be able to tell one that could really engage the reader. Instead, my writing became a disjointed series of meandering topics, and while they sometimes seemed entertaining enough as separate vignettes, it still felt… incomplete, somehow. I was passionate about exploring, traveling, history and finding adventure, but how do I put all that together into a coherent story arc? Geocaching provided an answer to that question, helping to bridge the gap between these different themes, as well as provide ample fodder to keep me writing.

All in all, I am grateful for this new hobby, and can’t wait to see what my geocaching hunts will uncover for me in the future.