maurice martin : : freelance journalist & playwright

Old-school scavenger hunts go high tech in the popular pastime called geocaching.

By Maurice Martin

From the February 2007 issue of Lee Magazine.

On a roasting-hot day in June 2004, the Johnson family set off on a hike in Hickey's Creek Mitigation Park, a massive preserve just east of Fort Myers. Lehigh Acres residents Rob and Staci, along with their kids Cody and Katlyn, wanted to explore the scrubby grasslands and pine flats deep in the park. Perhaps they'd even spot the brown-tiled dome of a gopher tortoise, whose diminishing habitat the park was created to mitigate. But they didn't get very far before turning back.

Staci thought she saw a kumquat tree some distance from the trail. Craving the tart micro-oranges, she asked 14-year-old Cody to investigate. No luck: It was just an air-potato vine wrapped around a tree. Yet the detour was surprisingly fruitful once Cody noticed a plastic icecream bucket under a bush.

"I thought it was either drugs or drug money," Rob says. Inside the bucket, the family found an assortment of trinkets: Mardi Gras beads, figurines and tiny toys "like you'd get with a McDonald's Happy Meal," he adds. There was also a book filled with short, dated messages, each signed by someone different. The cover identified it as a geocaching logbook.

Geocaching is a kind of high-tech treasure hunt that begins when someone hides a container, or cache, and records its location in latitude and longitude. The hider posts the location on a Web site, and other geocachers go hunting for the cache using a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. Once an esoteric diversion, geocaching is now an activity at hotels across the country, including the Diamondhead Beach Resort on Fort Myers Beach. State and local parks are also getting in on the game.

The Johnsons found basic geocaching rules inside the logbook. When you find a cache, it is customary to take something out, sign the logbook and leave something of your own. The Johnsons had a perfect item with them: an old Disney World key ring. They swapped it for some Mardi Gras beads, logged their first cache and then abandoned their hike to go home and research geocaching on the Internet.

Since that time, they've hunted down more than 800 caches.

Some outings deliver thrills, like the time in Caloosahatchee Regional Park when Rob and Staci startled a wild pig and her six babies. But generally, "the fun is going to places you wouldn't see otherwise," Rob says. "I've been to parks in this county that I didn't know existed."

Outdoor exploration is only part of geocaching's multifaceted appeal. It can be a family activity or solo adventure. It's techie. It's affordable, requiring only an Internet connection and a GPS receiver ($100 for a basic unit, sold at any sporting goods store). And it can be an exercise in puzzle solving.

GPS receivers, as accurate as they are now, still only put you within a couple of yards of a cache. To help seekers through those last few feet, hiders include writtern clues in their Internet postings--many of which are deliberately cryptic, relying on puns or riddles. Here's one for an "urban cache" in downtown Punta Gorda:

The streets they are one-way only,
so the parking challenge may leave you lonely.

Seek the Marms, they number three,
A magnetic micro there will be.

The poet/geocacher in this case is Cape Coral resident Dean Traiger. A family practice physician, Traiger works a grueling schedule, seeing about 30 patients during a workday that often runs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. But if a new cache pops up in his area, he is likely to shrug off the day's fatigue and hunt for the cache on his way home, skulking through the wilderness with GPS in hand, still wearing his slacks, dress shirt, and tie.

Traiger manages his family, work and geocaching time by multitasking. "I take my 3-year-old daughter geocaching, and we talk about ecology and the animals, plants and bugs that we spot," he says. He also makes a point to geocache when he travels on business and has found caches in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City and Washington, D.C. In between, he writes a column for the online-and-print magazine Today's Cache and runs the Web site www.floridageocaching.com, which boasts a membership of about 800. He estimates that Lee County has about 100 active geocachers.

Good for Green

Lee County parks have become so popular with both local geocachers and those from out of state that in early 2006, Lee County Parks and Recreation began taking an active role in managing caches within their domain. The agency now bans the use of ammo boxes, which are common cache containers, because park visitors may mistake them for live ordnance. Another popular container, PVC pipe painted in camouflage colors, is also out. Apparently, it looks too much like a pipe bomb.

That's not to say Lee County is discouraging geocaching-far from it. Park ranger Elizabeth Wilder says the park system is courting geocachers, who tend to be well-behaved visitors and appreciative of the environment. Parks and Recreation is even considering creating its own unique geocoins: custom tokens that some geocachers collect.

Lee County Parks and Recreation would place the geocoins in caches, where they would be free for the taking.

"They'd be another draw for the parks," Wilder says. Charlotte County Visitor's Bureau has already issued a series of 300 geocoins, distributing them in 25 caches around the county. Those geocoins are tied to a tourism promotion program: Finders can trade them in for free gifts like a round of golf or a massage--all within Charlotte County, of course.

Urban caches, geocoins-the jargon goes on. Talk to geocachers long enough and you'll hear about event caches, multi-caches, geomuggles and webcam caches. But geocaching is really only as baroque as you want it to be.

The Johnson family keeps it simple. They don't trade geocoins or other collectibles-though they do keep cachers' signature items, such as packs of dental floss left by the local man who goes by the Web name "flossmoor." For the Johnsons and many others, the thrill of finding treasure is secondary to the experience of the hunt.

Still, every once in a while a cache item stands out as a rousing discovery.

"Someone from Kentucky left a set of 'rock-em sock-em' frog pens," Rob says, describing a pen with a tiny lever in its side and a frog on its end. Pull the lever and the frog throws punches. "That's cool stuff!"

***

Sidebar: A Brief History of Geocaching

According to the most popular geocaching Web site, www.geocaching.com, the sport got its start in 2000 when the U.S. government ordered its GPS-enabled satellites to transmit a different kind of signal than had previously been used. GPS receivers suddenly became 10 times more accurate.

In May of that year, computer consultant Dave Ulmer decided to test the new signal by hiding a black bucket of items near Beaver Creek, Oregon. Three days later,the cache had been found twice, and before a week had passed, others started hiding their own caches and posting the coordinates.

In September, the "sport" got a mention on Slashdot.com, a popular site that identifies itself as "news for nerds." A month later the New York Times ran a story on geocaching, ushering it into the mainstream. Today, geocaching.com puts the worldwide number of active participants at about one million. More than 300,000 caches are maintained in 222 countries.