River City Weekly

BY SHEL WILLIAMS
River City Weekly

It all began with Clinton and a can of beans.

When the Clinton administration removed the signal degradation programs from orbiting satellites in May 2000, any point on the planet could be accurately described within feet of its latitude and longitude coordinates.

Two days later, a computer consultant decided to test his GPS’s accuracy by hiding a bucket in the woods outside Beaver Creek, Ore., and challenging other GPS geeksters to find it. The idea was to take something from the bucket to prove you’d arrived, leave something else in exchange, then hoof it back to the computer to report your success online.

And in the bucket was a can of beans, among other things.

Like most online phenomena, the idea spread quickly, and a year later there were 6,000 treasures hidden in 68 countries around the world. Instead of an equipment test, it became a game, to some even a sport, known as geocaching.

Idaho Falls resident Beth Watson had been hearing geocaching tales for years from relatives living in upstate New York, but until recently she’d never had the chance to try it for herself. Then she married a man with a GPS, and within the year their weekend ATV rides carried them to hunt geocaches hidden close to their recreational property near Rockland, Idaho.

“We found one, and that was it,” Watson said. “We were totally hooked.”

Ten geocache finds later, and they’ve already hidden a geocache of their own in Houtz Canyon in the Sublett Mountains.

For Watson, geocaching adds an interesting twist to their recreational pastimes.

“We’re outdoors a lot anyway, and it’s gotten us to explore more around Rockland, now that we have a mission,” Watson said. “We’ve definitely discovered a lot of new canyons, and seen a lot of new territory that we probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”

But not all geocaches are hidden in buckets in the woods. City parks and the occasional cemetery are also home to the treasure “chests,” which can range in size from a watch battery to, typically, an Army surplus ammunitions box.

In fact, Seattle is home base to the game. Seattle resident Jeremy Irish is the founder of www.geocaching.com, where the geocaching game begins and ends. Irish used to play the online role-playing game, Everquest, but when he learned that technology, treasure hunting and the great outdoors were all rolled into one game called geocaching, he became its greatest champion.

A recent trip to California provided Watson the chance to introduce her 8-year-old nephew to geocaching in an urban environment.

“Anywhere I go now, I try to download coordinates for where I’m going to be,” she said.

And Watson could go just about anywhere and still go geocaching. Today the Web site lists 643,556 geocaches hidden from the Arabian peninsula to New Zealand and from Norway’s Nordkapp to Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

A trinket to trade or sometimes just a signature in a logbook are all that’s left to show that someone has visited a geocache. The online organization promotes picking up trash on the hike in to hunt a cache, and cautions against placing caches on private property without permission. The cache containers are usually hidden in a rock crevice, tucked beneath a pile of twigs, or sometimes suspended from a tree branch. True to its beginnings, an online log entry is posted to the cache page, and the Web site tracks each cacher’s total.

As for the can of beans? Somehow it was never traded for. It was later recovered and turned into a travel bug — see the glossary — which occasionally makes appearances at various geocaching get-togethers. But what do you call a geocaching get together? An event cache, of course, and attending an event even counts toward your total finds.

Cache me in!

Want to play? Log onto www.geocaching.com and create a free account. Then click on “Hide and Seek a Cache,” and type in your zip code to find the geocaches hidden nearest to you.

Each cache description lists the size of the cache container — usually micro, small or regular — and also rates how well the cache is hidden and the type of terrain that must be covered to reach it (wheelchair accessible versus drop-in by helicopter.)

Download the coordinates to your GPS receiver, grab a treasure to trade with, put on your hiking boots, and you’re off. Don’t forget sunscreen and water, and remember to tell someone where you are headed — you’ll even have the coordinates.

Know the lingo

Like any sport, geocaching has its own language even its own acronyms. Here’s a brief glossary of some common terms you’ll find on the Web site.

CITO — “Cache In, Trash Out.” The act of removing and disposing of trash you may find while searching for a cache.

DRUNKEN BEE DANCE — The movements of a geocacher trying to pinpoint ground zero; chasing the directional arrow first one direction and then another has been termed the Drunken Bee Dance.

FTF — First To Find: The first person to locate a cache after it has been placed.

GROUND ZERO — The point where the coordinates displayed on your GPS exactly match the coordinates given for a cache.

MUGGLE — A non-geocacher (taken from the Harry Potter series of books). Also geomuggle.

MUGGLED — The discovery of a cache by a non-geocacher. When someone refers to a cache as having been muggled, it almost always means it was stolen or vandalized.

TFTC or TFTH — “Thanks for the cache” or “Thanks for the hunt (or hide).”

TNLNSL — “Took nothing, left nothing, signed log.”

TRAVEL BUG — An item that travels from cache to cache. The item has unique tracking number (assigned by www.geocaching.com), which allows you to follow its journey.

Posted by Idaho Falls newspaper River City Weekly