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The GPS leads Grey into the woods of Alum Spring Park. He and other geocachers say their sport is exercise with a purpose.
Fredericksburg resident J.R. Grey checks his GPS to find a trail that will lead him to hidden treasures. Grey is a fan of the new sport of "geocaching."
Halfway to his destination, Grey checks an opening in the trees to see if his GPS might be able to pick up a satellite signal.
What's at the end of the trail? Goodies. Grey chooses this Coleman lantern keychain and leaves a Hot Wheels car and a Pez dispenser for others to find. |
Twenty-first-century game players can now call on space satellites and atomic clocks to give them the same sorts of clues.
This modern version is called geocaching; it's played with hand-held global positioning system receivers. And it's way more fun than the birthday-party game.
"I found it! It's right over here," yelled Julie Martin of Fredericksburg, bounding excitedly through the leaf mold on the forest floor last Friday.
It was the third find of the day for Martin and her boyfriend and geocaching partner, J.R. Grey, also of Fredericksburg. But it was the first one that Martin had spotted.
The white Tupperware box was nestled at the base of a huge beech tree, about 50 yards off the nature trail in Northern Virginia's Fountainhead Regional Park. Partially shielded from view by carefully placed bark, sticks and leaves, the box required a sharp eye to spot.
Opened, it revealed a stuffed bichon frisé that made rude noises when squeezed, a movie video, a sci-fi paperback, a deck of playing cards, a Matchbook helicopter, a Beatles compact disc and assorted other questionable treasures.
It's the lure of the hunt that's addictive, not the loot at the end of the trail.
It works this way: Cache hiders pick a nice outdoor spot that's fairly easy to get to, but not all that obvious. They then post the latitude and longitude of their caches on an Internet site (www.geocaching.com), with directions to the trailhead and a couple of general clues to get the hunt started.
Those who have already found the cache usually post that fact at the bottom of the directions page with comments about how much fun they had doing it.
Cache seekers go to the Web page for a directory of nearby caches. Once they select one, they enter the latitude and longitude numbers in their GPS units and drive or walk to the starting point. Then they wander over hill and dale, through wood and swamp, guided by the little black arrow on the GPS screen.
When they find the cache, players may take something from the box as long as they replace it with something else. Most boxes are filled with inexpensive outdoor gear, small keepsakes and playthings. Some boxes also have disposable cameras that finders can use to document their discovery.
Geocachers also sign the logbook inside the box, using a "nom de geocache." They briefly relate their adventures on the way in.
Finding the cache is not a given. Heavy leaf cover in deep woods can interfere with the satellite signals, which causes problems. The GPS units are accurate only to within 50 feet or so of the destination, and those last few feet can be a killer.
"You guys are the eyes. I'm just telling you how to get there," said Grey, the GPS operator, when Martin complained about an elusive cache.
Grey, 33, and Martin, 42, have been geocaching for about a month.
Grey found out about the sport while flipping through the TV channels one night.
"I just caught the end of the show, but I thought it looked cool," Grey said.
He went on the Internet and discovered the geocaching site.
"I said, 'Wow, I've gotta go get one of these things,'" he said.
He did the first hunt by himself, just to see what it was like, but Martin has been with him on every one since.
"She loves the outdoors," Grey said, "anything to do outdoors."
They are trying to get permission from Spotsylvania County officials to hide a cache of their own near where Grey grew up in Partlow.
Geocaching is a relatively new entry in the cross-country/treasure-hunt outdoor sports category.
The global positioning system--24 satellites orbiting 11,000 nautical miles above the earth's surface--was developed by the military for strategic purposes. For security reasons, the hand-held units used by civilians weren't accurate closer than 300 feet. But on May 1, 2000, the government lifted that restriction, and geocaching became possible.
The first geocache was put in place as a way of celebrating the end of the restriction, according to Jeremy Irish, Webmaster for the geocaching Internet site. A man outside of Portland, Ore., hid a lidded bucket and posted the coordinates to an Internet newsgroup. The idea caught fire.
Incidentally, although he now lives in Seattle, Irish lived in Stafford County and went to Garrisonville Elementary School as a boy. A self-confessed "tech head," Irish got interested in geocaching shortly after it started.
"I like gadgets, and I found out about the GPS stashes. It's a way of combining virtual reality and real reality," he said in a telephone conversation.
When Irish took over the Web site last August, there were 75 caches worldwide, he said. Now there are 82 in Virginia alone, 75 in Maryland, five in Washington and 400 in California. The game is played worldwide, with caches in such far-flung outposts as Fiji and Finland, Canada and Croatia, Botswana and Belize.
There are now sites in 61 countries, with new ones popping up every day.
The demographics have changed in the 16 months since the game started, Irish said. At first it was played by tech types, and they used to load their caches with computer equipment like mouse pads and such. Now, the prizes are more apt to be Beanie Babies and children's games.
Handheld GPS devices range in price from just over $100 to more than $1,000, depending on how sophisticated they are.
No other equipment is needed, however, and the sport is drawing interest from whole families, from backpacked toddlers to grandparents.
"It's really fun to get in to the cache, [and] get out. You get exercise and you don't even know it," Grey said.
Geocaching also provides an excellent reason for getting out and discovering historical sites or sylvan settings.
Grey grew up in Partlow and has lived in the city for 12 years, but he marveled as he entered Alum Spring Park on his first hunt of the day.
"You know," he said, "in all these years I've never been here. This is beautiful!"
