Geocaching

[toef]

Anybody here consider geocaching one of their hobbies?

I heard about it a couple years ago and thought it was pretty fascinating.

~~~

For the uninformed, you basically use a GPS device to find little hidden "treasure".

The "treasure" is some sort of canister, commonly a film canister, Tupperware container (like for lunch meat) or a small ammo box. Inside there's a roll of paper or a notebook to log that you found it, and in the larger canisters there might be some cheap little trinkets which you can swap for.

According to Wikipedia (always a great source), there are about 950,000 hidden caches around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching

~~~

So anyway, I looked up my address and noticed about 25 of them within less than a mile from my doorstep, so I decided to give it a try. The GPS is surprisingly accurate, and led me within a couple feet of the cache. A tip from the website mentioned it'd be near a boulder, so finding it was pretty easy at that point.

[mywxrld]

http://www.geocaching.com

[Marquoz]

I used to do this all the time. I've been to a meetup for them as well. They have some seriously good ones out there. There was one here where you actually went on the roof of a skyscraper if you went at a certain time. There's also been very nice walking sticks as "prizes" for first to find. It's a great hobby because it gets you outdoors, it shows you places you might not even know about in your city, it challenges the mind!

My ex-wife used glow in the dark tacks to mark a path for one of her caches. So if you go at night you see these little glowing markers to tell you how to get there.

It's also awesome when you are out of town to go grab a few caches. Did that while driving somewhere and picked up a few.

It does have it's downsides though. There are some that you end up wading through water because the area flooded, poison ivy/oak grows around some of them, climbing over debris can cause injuries.

All in all, I love it, and now that you've reminded me of it, I might have to pick up a new GPS and get back doing it one of these days.

[Marquoz]

Originally Posted by toefer

So anyway, I looked up my address and noticed about 25 of them within less than a mile from my doorstep, so I decided to give it a try. The GPS is surprisingly accurate, and led me within a couple feet of the cache. A tip from the website mentioned it'd be near a boulder, so finding it was pretty easy at that point.

Just a tip, if you are planning on doing a lot in a day, print out the tips but don't read them. Try to find the cache first, and then if you are stuck for a while look at the tips. Once you've been doing it for a while you won't need the tips as much because you'll "get in the mind" of the people leaving them and see the hiding spots.

[toef]

Originally Posted by mywxrld

http://www.geocaching.com

I signed up for that site the other day, and use that to input coordinates into Google Maps on my phone, which then feeds into a basic geocaching program (you can toggle between an arrow pointing you to the right direction, or a radar with the cache showing up as a green dot).

Originally Posted by Marquoz

Just a tip, if you are planning on doing a lot in a day, print out the tips but don't read them. Try to find the cache first, and then if you are stuck for a while look at the tips. Once you've been doing it for a while you won't need the tips as much because you'll "get in the mind" of the people leaving them and see the hiding spots.

Yeah, I'd rather have a go at it first, and then rely on tips if I get stuck. I like that geocaching.com has their simple decryption to scramble up the tips, so you don't accidentally read them while scanning through the page.

I went and looked for 3 today, but only found one. The first one I gave up on, because I felt like it was on private property, and didn't want to mingle around too long. Not to mention it was in a wooded area near an elementary school, and school was letting out soon, so I probably would've looked like a creep.

The second I found without much of a problem, because my GPS guided me right to it.

The third was in a wooded area near a cemetery, supposedly at the top of the hill. The description for the cache mentioned it's a nice place to watch the sun set, so I imagined it was up on a hill, overlooking the city. Problem is my GPS was acting up, and kept telling me I was 10 yards away, regardless of where I walked.

I'm wondering if a standalone GPS is more accurate, or if GPS is GPS, and the one on my phone would be sufficient, using the geocaching app on it. The app has a button to take you to the webpage for the cache, so I hit that, and read the hint, which said it was in a hollow tree trunk. The problem is there were probably 20 tree trunks within a 30 foot radius, and it was starting to get dark in the woods, so I gave up. Not to mention I didn't particularly feel like sticking my arm into some soggy tree trunks (it rained a lot last night).

[toef]

Oh, and how would you know to go to the top of a building? Is that given as a hint/description, or do they give an elevation, or do you just assume?

[jbig31]

Who hides these treasures?

[Marquoz]

Originally Posted by toefer

I'm wondering if a standalone GPS is more accurate, or if GPS is GPS, and the one on my phone would be sufficient, using the geocaching app on it. The app has a button to take you to the webpage for the cache, so I hit that, and read the hint, which said it was in a hollow tree trunk. The problem is there were probably 20 tree trunks within a 30 foot radius, and it was starting to get dark in the woods, so I gave up. Not to mention I didn't particularly feel like sticking my arm into some soggy tree trunks (it rained a lot last night).

From what I've noticed they're all basicly the same. A lot of it depends on the satellites and cloud cover more then the actual unit. Some units will be better, but they should still be relatively similar in accuracy. There will always be some drift though because of the way the GPS system is set up. It's not 100% accurate, nor will it ever be. From what I understand there's a slight degree of drift built into the system to prevent targeting systems taking advantage of them. So you will have the drift of the initial GPS plotting the cache, and then the drift of your own GPS plotting the co-ordinates. Because of this, as I said, a GPS is a GPS.

(If I'm wrong about the fuzzy co-ordinates, somebody please correct me!)

[toef]

Originally Posted by Marquoz

So you will have the drift of the initial GPS plotting the cache, and then the drift of your own GPS plotting the co-ordinates. Because of this, as I said, a GPS is a GPS.

(If I'm wrong about the fuzzy co-ordinates, somebody please correct me!)

Cool, thanks. Good to know I won't really need a standalone unit.

Originally Posted by jbig31

Who hides these treasures?

The Easter Bunny.

[Show spoiler]Actually its just random people who feel like doing it. The one I found today was hidden by some local college kids about 8 years ago, and is still there. Anyone is free to hide a cache, and can post it on geocaching.com, provided it follows some simple rules.

[jbig31]

The Easter Bunny.

[Show spoiler]Actually its just random people who feel like doing it. The one I found today was hidden by some local college kids about 8 years ago, and is still there. Anyone is free to hide a cache, and can post it on geocaching.com, provided it follows some simple rules.

I knew it!

[toef]

Originally Posted by jbig31

I knew it!

Haha

~~~

Unrelated, I was looking at some of the comments on the one cache I couldn't find. It seems like I walked right past it, and the hint that it was in a tree stump wasn't helpful, not only because there are a ton of tree stumps in the area, but because it's actually in a fallen tree (though there are a lot of those in this part of the woods too).

I'll try to get back to it sometime in the next few days, since it seemed like a good one (it's a decent sized ammo box, with random trinkets inside).

When reading some of the comments about it on geocaching.com, it was crazy to see how many caches some of these people have found (5,000, 10,000, 18,000, etc). I'm at 1 and counting.

[jbig31]

What kind of GPS or you using? When I think of a GPS I immediately think of what I use in my car-but I'm pretty sure that's NOT what you are using (you said your phone app)

[toef]

Originally Posted by jbig31

What kind of GPS or you using? When I think of a GPS I immediately think of what I use in my car-but I'm pretty sure that's NOT what you are using (you said your phone app)

Just the GPS built into my phone:



There's a free app in the Android marketplace called GeoBeagle, which lets you import the Google Maps info, which you can get straight off of geocaching.com.

So it automatically searches for the closest caches near my current location, then I click one, and it imports it into GeoBeagle, and then GeoBeagle shows an arrow to point me in the right direction, and gives an estimate of how far away it is.



There are some other geocaching apps on the Android Marketplace, but they cost money, and I'm cheap. Groundspeak (the company that owns geocaching.com) has an iPhone app, and is currently working on an Android version, so I think I'll just stick with GeoBeagle until that comes out.

It looks pretty cool, and has the benefit of working directly with your geocaching.com account, since they own the site.

[JakeNRoland]

I used to do this two about five years ago or so. Probably more fun and maybe easier now with improved GPS devices.

It's cool. People leave stuff in the caches and you can either take stuff, drop off stuff, or just peak around and leave everything as is.

I've visited an all hat themed cache well hidden in a big plastic tub behind some bushes. I also found a copy of Caddyshack in a cache once. One cache had a book with blank pages and colored pencils so everyone who had been there before drew a picture of something. There's some neat stuff out there.

[toef]

So I went back to the cemetery and searched around in the woods again, looking at every fallen tree I could find. I knew from the description that it was near the top of the hill, because they mentioned the nice views.

Just when I was about to give up hope again, I decided to check out a couple more trees that were slightly down the other side of the hill. First had nothing, but I ducked down and looked into the second one, and found it.

It was a .50 cal ammo box, so it was easy to spot, once you looked into the right hollow tree. Inside were a lot of random things (cds, free beer tokens for local bars, McDonalds toys, etc.). I took a little metal boat affixed to a piece of rock, which is made to sit on a shelf/desk, and left behind some Euro coins.