Geocaching

You may ask: "What is Geocaching?" Well, it's a high-tech treasure hunting kind of thing. It involves a GPS and an internet connection, and finally a registration at the www.geocaching.com site. How it works is: someone with a GPS unit hides a small notebook (the geocache log) with optional swag (could be anything like a coin, a toy soldier, a seashell, etc.) in a weatherproof container somewhere in the world (it has to be near where they can maintain the cache on a regular basis) and publishes the GPS coordinates on the website. Then the intrepid geocacher downloads these coordinates to his or her GPS unit and goes looking for the cache. There's a ranking system for the difficulty of finding the cache: terrain and difficulty of hide are both graded from 1 to 5 - with 5 being next to impossible. There are also various sizes of containers from nano (possibly no bigger than a watch battery) through micro (35mm film canister size) and small (vitamin bottle size) to regular (typically a Tupperware™ container or an ammo case). The "owner", or the person who hid the cache, also includes on the site some sort of description of the cache, or possibly the significance of it and optionally a clue as to its location. One of my favorite clues I read just recently and dealt with a cache hidden in the woods, near a stream with a bridge over it. The clue went something like: "My kids favorite story is about the Three Billy Goats Gruff so that's where I hid the cache". If you're not familiar with the story (my son-in-law was not) the clue does very little good. But, since I WAS familiar with the story, I knew where we needed to concentrate our efforts.

I spent some time with my son-in-law over the holiday doing some geocaching. Apparently a favorite haunt of geocachers is cemeteries (pun intended). Out of 10 caches that we sought one day, 6 were in cemeteries. One of the cemeteries had a plaque stating that the mother of Brigham Young was buried there.

My son-in-law is an avid geocacher. I introduced him to it about a year ago and he is fast approaching the 300 mark of found caches. (As for me, I'm sort-of, maybe-I'll-get-there, coming up on 50 found caches.) He's such a caching fanatic that we incorporated it into one of his Christmas gifts this year: we had the gift at a set of GPS coordinates, and had two sets of coordinates for him to go to in order to find the next set. We sent him to a cemetery (go figure), and then to the local marina. The final destination was supposed to be a friend's pond, but, he and my daughter surprised us and arrived nearly 12 hours earlier than we had anticipated so we hid the gift in the garage. It was lots of fun doing this high-tech scavenger hunt. He even said it was a really cool idea (thanks to my lovely wife for the inspiration).

Well, the holiday vacation was over for me and I had to return to work. Our guests were still staying with us, so Scott continued his geocaching adventures, and I do mean adventures: one of the caches he was seeking had to be postponed due to bear!

Yes, I said bear.

As he got to within 100 feet of the location of the cache, he heard a roar. That gave him pause (for some reason) and he stopped for a second. He took another step and heard a second roar about 200 feet in front of him. He decided that he didn't need to proceed right then - the cache wasn't going anywhere - and began backpedaling until he felt safe to turn and quickly leave the woods. He says he's never been so scared. We returned to the site a few days later, better prepared. Scott had his survival knife (he said he'd have gone further the first time if he'd had the knife then - oh, the confidence of youth!), and I had my 12 gauge shotgun loaded with a slug. You might think that that was adequate preparation, but, considering that my shotgun is a single-shot you might be thinking "oh, the foolishness of dotage". Well, we found the cache and saw neither hide nor hair of the bear (thank the Lord). It made for probably the most exciting cache I've ever searched for, though, and I wasn't even present when the bear roared!

I hope all (2?, 3?) of my readers had a wonderful Christmas and will have a very good New Year.