Using A Compass To Cache

[smartfair]

Hi, This is smartfair, a class of students from the midwest. We have been caching with our students since January. I remember high pointing in Rhode Island when I first heard about geocaching. The high pointer told me that he had seen kids with compasses find caches faster than their parents with a gps unit. We would like to teach orienteering to our students and incorporate our geocaching trips. How do we use compasses to find the caches, is there another reference to the sites other than the lat/longs, do we convert them, any help out there? thanks for your responses.

[+AtoZ]

The only thing you can do is trinagulate with a compass from land marks to find you prestent position so that then you can calculate to where you have to be. Look at a map that has the cache on it and figure where you are at and then where the cache is then find a route from you to the cache. You have to use some coordinate system, UTM maybe easier then LAT/LONG. But you need to know where you are to get to where you want to go.

cheers

[+Joypa]

My Magellan GPS has a feature that allows you to lock onto a cache. It then gives you a distance and a direction. From the Parking Lot, you could tell your students that the cash is at xxx degrees and a distance of yyy feet and let them go. To keep them on track, you could move closer and give them new data.

[+denali7]

what joypa said is exactly how i do it with my daughter and her friends. it's so easy to extend the time kids will be interested if you let them feel like they're doing the work. i got a couple of el cheapo compasses for them to follow the numbers i give (from my handy dandy vista c). [there's even the opportunity for a mini-lesson on the difference between bearing and heading here--grab that teachable moment! ] keep them up to date on the amount of feet as you near the cache and they'll be racing to ground zero!!

with my students, i divided them into teams, with each team using a borrowed gps, let them design team flags, then had them find their opponent's flags hidden in camo containers on school grounds. it was kind of a capture-the-flag race to see which team would get to their opponent's hidden flag first. i threw a handful of butterfingers mini's in the containers (they were only hidden for a short time--no critter problems!) and the kids were jumping around like preschoolers when they opened the lids. (..and these were high schoolers!!)

-denali

[MapheadMike]

The best site for creating a paper map for a cache site is lostoutdoors.com. You can choose to use an aerial photo or a topo map (both public domain from USGS). The cache coordinates are marked onto the image for you. The images can be copied with a right click into a word processing program. The size of the image is identifiable, so you can manipulate the scale by enlarging or reducing the image within your document (i.e. the 600m x 600m aerial photo could be reduced to 12cm x 12 cm for a 1:5,000 image, or enlarged to 20cm x 20cm for a 1:3,000 image, or whatever best matches the marks on your (or your students's) compasses, english/metric preferences, etc.). After the image has been scaled, you can crop off extra areas, such as areas on the wrong side of a road.

 

For most of the caches out there, you can navigate sufficently off the aerial photo. Unless there has been a major change in the area of your cache, that is true there.

 

For orienteering info, look to Indiana Crossroads Orienteering. They run great events out there, including one next month near you. Competitive orienteering and GPSless geocaching compliment each other well.

[+Cardinal Red]

As great as Geocaching is, it's not the only game available. In between finding Caches, take a look at Letterboxing North America

 

No GPS required. From the Letterboxing home page:

LETTERBOXING is an intriguing pastime combining navigational skills and rubber stamp artistry in a charming "treasure hunt" style outdoor quest.

 

You don't have to play one or the other. You can do both.