Geocaching article in today's Newsday

[+drat19]

http://www.newsday.com/features/ny-p2cover3352845jun30,0,4909299.story

 

-Dave R. in Biloxi (ex-Queens, NY)

[+briansnat]

Good article!

 

"Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day" - Dave Barry

[+MissJenn]

Here is the text, in case it won't be available directly from the newsday folks after today:

 

quote:

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Cache and Carry

Getting there is half the fun for techno-treasure hunters

By Denise Flaim, STAFF WRITER, June 30, 2003

 

We are deep in the woods on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Well, not too deep - the nearby whoosh of the Northern State Parkway lets us know we are in Commack, not the Catskills. Wild roses catch our pant legs, twigs and fallen leaves crunch underfoot.

 

Andrew Hans, an optometrist from East Northport, doesn't consult his global positioning system unit, which has been preprogrammed with the exact coordinates we are seeking: N 40° 49.278 W 073° 16.051. He's been here so many times, he can find the target blindfolded: a hollow tree stump with a Tupperware container hidden in its base.

 

Up ahead, off the winding path, which in turn is off a main path in Hoyt Farm Park, is the sought-after stump.

 

As his 8-year-old daughter, Rachel, positions her Barbie umbrella over him, he carefully removes the branches and twigs that camouflage the hole at the stump's base. He reaches in, and pulls out the container.

 

The markered lid reads, "$ Origami II by Eyedoc," followed by an eyeball logo.

 

The Tupperware, which Hans placed here more than a month ago, is called a cache. And it's one of tens of thousands of hidden hordes that dot the metropolitan area, and the world beyond.

 

Born out of the obsession with high-tech toys, geocaching is a kind of satellite-fueled treasure hunt. Not-so-distant legend has it that the first cache was placed outside of Portland, Ore., in May 2000, in celebration of the Clinton administration's decision to discontinue Selective Availability, a kind of fudge factor that limited the accuracy of non-military GPS units. Later that year, www.geocaching.com was launched, and a new sport was hatched, with 57,850 active caches in 177 countries to date.

 

Geocachers like Hans fill their caches with inexpensive trinkets - golf balls, embroidered patches, key chains, Happy Meal toys - and a log book, then hide them and post the coordinates at www.geocaching.com. In turn, other geocachers download the numbers to their GPS, trek out to find the cache, and then log in their discovery on the Web site.

 

While geocaching can be a solitary affair, it appeals especially to families, who enjoy the time together and the learning experience for their children. Some caches are themed - say, items starting with the letter "G." There are underwater caches accessible only by divers, and microcaches that use plastic film canisters or Altoid tins instead of the favored Tupperware (or, in more rural areas, ammo boxes).

 

Hans' cache is a traditional one, and since he is an origamist whose specialty is folding dollar bills, a cache full of cash was the natural choice. As raindrops drip around him, he opens the Tupperware and checks the intricately folded dollar-bill creations. Among the flat ones are a bowtie, a Star of David, a set of captain's wings and a geometric piece called 11 Diamonds. A film container holds a miniature dollar-bill jack-in-the-box that actually works.

 

"The idea is to take something, and replace it with something," says Hans, who read about geocaching in a newspaper article and got his GPS unit with reward points from a credit card. "What I ask people to do is take a dollar, but leave a dollar. Then I exchange them at the bank for crisp bills, and make more origami."

 

The reason for today's rainy-day visit is to see what has been left behind by The Jester, a geocacher from Amagansett. In addition to a dollar, he has left his calling card, which, not surprisingly, bears a picture of a jester. And among the neatly folded bills is a CD, which Hans pockets.

 

The cache replaced, the twigs restored to their state of insouciant camouflage, father and daughter head home.

 

Hans has never met The Jester, and probably never will. But as his CD player swallows the disc, he's treated to a quirky mix: the "Twilight Zone" theme, a klezmer tune, David Bowie's cover of the Simon and Garfunkel chestnut "America" and some Henry Mancini.

 

"What I liked about geocaching was the combination of high tech and low tech wrapped around with this fun treasure-hunt aspect," says The Jester, a 42-year-old artist and father of two who, in geocaching's spirit of anonymity, prefers not to give his real name. "It conjures up feelings that you have from childhood."

 

Sometimes accompanied by his daughters, ages 10 and 6, The Jester also has found virtual caches - landmarks that are located with a set of clues. At the risk of being labeled a "spoiler," he names one: Jackson Pollock's gravestone in a Springs cemetery.

 

The Jester doesn't just find caches - he places them, too. He's hidden 10, including the Island's easternmost one, at Montauk Point.

 

"It's like fishing for people, and it's addictive to keep checking the site to see who has checked in and what they've taken," he says, confiding that Jester is actually his dog's name. "It's kind of another creative outlet. And I like sharing locations that I've loved while growing up out here and things that are evocative for me."

 

The key to success in finding a cache is the GPS unit itself, and geocachers have strong opinions about which models and manufacturers provide the best accuracy.

 

"I've spent half an hour looking for a cache, I've spent less," says Daniel Boggiano, 31, of Forest Hills. "On a real good day, you can get between three and five feet" of a cache's location using the GPS alone. Cloud cover and trees can sometimes affect accuracy. "But it's also a question of how accurate was this person when he placed it?"

 

For Boggiano, who works on the NYPD's crime-scene unit, geocaching was "really an excuse for me to go out and get a new toy." Since May 2001, he's found about 60 caches, including one in New Jersey suspended by fishing line from a storm grate and one in Key West that was accessible only by boat.

 

"There's a lot in Queens," he says, leading the way to revisit a cache in Alley Pond Park in Douglaston, accompanied by his wife, Becky Storch, also 31, who is expecting their first child in September. "It's not really what you find, it's seeing new places that you wouldn't know about."

 

A huge puddle from the recent rain makes a detour necessary, and the perils are multilayered: mosquitoes in the shade-dappled air and poison ivy underfoot. The GPS unit is off by dozens of feet, but Boggiano finds the cache quickly in the base of a dead tree. (For first-time visits to a cache, geocachers sometimes have the option of consulting online clues provided by the person who placed it; sometimes, those clues are encoded and need to be decrypted.)

 

This cache is housed in a Chinese food container, and the rain has found its way in. The sodden log book is open to the date of Boggiano's last visit - Sept. 20, 2002, at 11:05 a.m.

 

Some geocachers are especially prolific. In the two years and two months he has been geocaching, Po Shan Cheah, 29, of Montvale, N.J., has found 1,667 caches.

 

"I can get a few here or there after work, but the bulk of it is on the weekends," he says, sharing his strategy for some Manhattan caches: He left his car on one side of Central Park, geocached across, then took a cab back to where he was parked.

 

"Usually I don't take anything from the cache," he says, adding that his most memorable cache involved a stunning walk along the side of a reservoir. "The fun is in getting there."

 

But perhaps not always. Cheah has looked up the locations of caches in his native Malaysia, and "there are one or two that are right in the middle of the jungle," he says, involving a three-hour boat ride and the attendant danger of tigers, snakes and poisonous spiders.

 

In our part of the world, one peril of geocaching is occasional looting, which is what happened to Hans' first cache in Sunshine Acres Park in Commack.

 

"The thing that hurt the most about what was stolen was not the money," says Hans. "It was the logbook." Dollar bills are replaceable, he notes. Memories aren't, like the time he took his brother and cousin on a nighttime hike to find that first cache, using a flashlight in the pitch dark to read the comments scrawled in the notebook.

 

Undaunted, he now has three caches: the one in Hoyt Farm Park, one he recently placed near his in-laws' home in Massachusetts and another that he is readying to mail to Rosa Sanchez, a fellow geocacher from Arizona, for her to place in the desert.

 

Hans also has created a "travel bug," a cache item designed to travel from one cache to another. Because he collects schnauzers, Hans placed a stuffed toy one in a Hauppauge cache, complete with a numbered dog tag so he could follow its journey online.

 

"I left: To Rosa, With Love, a travel bug, featuring Samantha the Schnauzer," he wrote on the Web site. "Her goal is to get to the Tucson area so my friend Rosa can retrieve her."

 

Travel bugs are coveted among geocachers, and if Samantha is lucky, she will have an eventful journey, arriving in the Southwest with photographs of her stops along the way. (Samantha posed in front of Disney World? The Sears Tower? The Four Corners?) And chances are Hans will never meet those who transported her. In fact, he's never met Sanchez, other than through e-mail.

 

But with an estimated 300,000 geocachers around the globe, some head-bumping is inevitable.

 

Ron LeBlanc, 71, of Lindenhurst, started geocaching about four months ago. On a recent visit to his brother in Goshen, N.Y., he was trekking down the Appalachian Trail when he came upon a family walking from the opposite direction.

 

"Are you a geocacher?" asked the patriarch, noticing the GPS unit hanging from LeBlanc's neck.

 

"He had just been to the cache - his young son found it," explains LeBlanc, who consults the geocaching Web site before he travels anywhere to see if there are any caches in the area.

 

As for that upstate cache, he didn't ask the successful geocachers for any hints about its location. "That," says LeBlanc somberly, "would have taken the sport out of it."

 

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

---

[enfanta]

By the time you read this, it will be too late...

 

WARNING! SPOILERS INCLUDED!!

 

Care the Deception of Imitative Administrator

[+JBadger]

Interesting to note that I picked up that travel bug and took it to trade at a geocaching event.

 

JBadger ICQ #2686614 -- AOL IM sen3398

Lets go Geocaching http://www.geocaching.com/

SF, Furry, EMS, CONS, food food spicy food.

[CacheNCarryMA]

Hey! I made it into the papers!

[+StormShadow]

Here's an article that appeared in The Patriot News (Harrisburg) this week.

 

Technological breakthrough

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

 

BY PAT CARROLL

Of The Patriot-News

 

If you want something more out of your trip to the woods than trees and flowers and bears, you might try the new game of geocaching.

 

(Warning: It's an equipment sport, and one that involves using the Internet.)

 

Here's the idea: Somebody hides a package in the woods, somebody else tries to find it.

 

Now here's the idea on steroids: Somebody hides a package inside a thorny, brambly shrub in the middle of bushwhacking country, takes a read on a handheld navigation device, then goes home and posts the coordinates on the Internet at www.geocaching.com.

Somebody else logs on, gets the coordinates and busts their brains trying to find it. If they do, they might put it back, or take it and leave an item of similar utility: a music CD for a music CD, a book for a book, and so on.

 

Joel Rackley, a software analyst, thought it might be something fun to do with his son Brendan, an eighth-grader at East Pennsboro Middle School.

 

So for Christmas, Brendan got a 5.3-ounce Garman eTrex, a handheld navigation device linked to the U.S. Global Positioning System.

 

GPS is a system developed by the Department of Defense to provide navigation signals from satellites 12,000 miles above Earth. There are two signals: an encrypted military code and an open free signal for civilians to use to determine positions on land or sea.

 

Most GPS use is by civilians, in everything from automotive navigation systems to wilderness hiking to . . . geocaching.

 

This spring, Staos and Neonnoodle (aka Rackley and Rackley) cached a green ammo box full of CDs at North 40.16.413 (that's north 40 degrees, 16 minutes, 41 seconds) by West 076.56.39, near a tree in Adams Ricci Park, East Pennsboro.

 

They posted it on the Web with the warning:

 

"VERY HEAVY OVERGROWTH during summer, lots of thorns. Wear long clothes."

 

The Rackleys had already made several finds. This was their first hide

 

"It was pretty cool seeing more people come to our cache in three months than some other local caches in nine months," Brendan said. "I think a lot of people were surprised at how hard it was to get to. If you look at it on a map, it looks like just another part of Adams-Ricci, but if you go there, you will have to bushwhack a good 100 feet before you get to the cache site."

 

Last month, a cache-searcher whose Web user name is jt-3rd posted, "Tried this one about three weeks ago. Considering ourselves fearless of any Geocache, we will have to admit this one SLAUGHTERED us. Sticker bushes? Ha! Those might as well have been the concertina barbed wire on a Federal supermax prison."

 

This week, a more experienced hunter code-named Columbo said, "Required some major bushwhacking due to heavy undergrowth. Camouflage was not needed to hide this one in the summer -- nature has taken care of that. Took a CD, left a CD and signed the log. Thanks for the cache."

 

The log is part of the geocache ethic.

 

Actually, the cache can be just a logbook in a waterproof container, with information from the person who founded the cache and notes from those who discover it. At the least, according to the protocol, a visitor should note the date and time.

 

Geocaching.com has a substantial log of frequently asked questions about the game, and a buyer's guide to GPS units.

 

Buxley's Geocaching Waypoint, a site that indexes caches, puts Pennsylvania 11th among the states in density of hidden treasures, with 1,402 caches published. Buxley maps them all, with links to the directions on geocaching.com.

 

PAT CARROLL: 255-9149 or pcarroll@patriot-news.com

[+Staos]

That's me!