Geocaching

My husband and I are geocachers. It used to be a family activity back when our son was young enough to allow himself to be seen with us when food wasn't being offered. He's 19 now and if we're not going to feed him, he's not coming. To be honest, he doesn't come quite a bit of the time even when food is offered.

Anyway, back to geocaching. In case you don't know what geocaching is, it's a kind of scavenger hunt played internationally with GPS units or smart phones. The short answer is we use billions of dollars of military hardware to find boxes hidden in the woods.   Someone hides a small box somewhere and posts the GPS coordinates on line, usually at http://www.geocaching.com.  Then people take the GPS units, go out to the coordinates and find the box. Inside the box is a log that the finders sign. There may be trinkets to trade for, but the real goal is just to find the cache and sign the log. Once the cache has been found, the cacher logs back on to geocaching.com and logs their find there as well. This gives the cache owner and other cachers a chance to read about their adventures finding the cache.

A lot of the time, the cache site was chosen by the cache owner because it was interesting and they wanted to show the site to other cachers. It might be a beautiful view, an interesting geological formation or a historical site.  Although a lot of caches are simply fit in wherever they'll go, many of them are definitely worth the walk to get there.

There have been other side things that have grown up around geocaching over the twelve years it's been around.

FTF is First to Find, there is always a bit of a race to be the first one to sign the log of a new cache.

Trackables - Coins or travel "bugs" that have numbers on them and travel from one cache to another. If one is found, it is logged then moved to another cache. Sometimes they have specific goals and can be moved toward those goals.

CITO - Cache In, Trash Out. We make every effort to leave places better than we find them. Also around Earth Day there are usually CITO events where we work with parks departments. etc. to help clean up.

This is what we do for fun. It sounds crazy to the uninitiated, but it gets us out of the house. A friend calls it Goal Oriented Hiking. We get exercise and fresh air. Sometimes fresher than I care for. Did I mention that we are on a caching streak? We have found at least one cache every single day for the past 878 days. In the Pacific Northwest that has had us out in some pretty wet weather, several snow days and one ice storm. Yeah, I know. Crazy. But it's fun, really.