The Not So Secret World of Geocaching

There we were walking around this tree squatting, moving around branches, trying to get a closer look. “You?” A calls out “No, you?” We were off the path trying to find a geocache and not having much luck, this was our second one, the first one we had not been able to find. Then finally I noticed a color that was slightly out of place “I found it.”

Geocaching is a hobby that I thought was only for techie geeks that were also outdoorsy, but apparently quite a few people do including a friend of mine from MS who had never heard of the Ipod Nano when I showed it to her in December (I think it had already been out for 6 months by then). Its a lot like a scavenger hunt, you get the coordinates and maybe a clue and then try to find a little treasure. Within the cache there are usually little trinkets and a log book which you sign and date and maybe leave a little message.

Apparently it started in 2000 when President Clinton lifted scrambling for civilian gps, so that manufacturers could produce more precise machines. One guy hid a bucket, posted the coordinates on the internet, and the great game was born.

Aaron and I went out today to Hendry’s beach in Santa Barbara to try and find the first cache. The cache was supposedly by the restaurant by the beach and there were quite a lot of people milling about, waling to and from the beach, or eating on the outside patio of the restaurant. So we get to where we think it might be (a gps has a +/- radius of about 20 feet) and try looking for it. Aaron is way more subtle than I am, I lean over the bushes and look under benches, he sits down and glances over at the bushes. Well we didn’t want to look to weird so after about ten minutes we gave up on that one and started down the beach looking for another one.

Again we felt kind of self conscious about holding a gps so like the idiots we are every once in awhile we would hold it up to our ears and pretend that it’s a cell phone, it kind of looks like one maybe people believed us, who knows I didn’t stop and ask. But as we start coming upto the place where the geocache should be Aaron informs me that he thinks he was mistaken and that the cache is probably not on the beach but instead above us 100 feet on the cliff. Lovely. There’s no way to get to cliff from the beach (well at least no way that we can see). So we head back to our car and look for a way to get to the cliffs from the street we came in on. About twenty feet past the parking lot we notice a little trail that goes up to cliffs, so we make a u-turn and re-park.

It takes awhile to get up the hill and to the cliffs and then some bad gps reading on our part. Finally we get to the spot that we think its in. Off the trail around a deformed, short tree we start searching for the cache. I finally find a Tupperware container, of course I don’t want to touch it because it looks kind of wet. Inside there are a bunch of little toys (I loved the gummi bears little figurine) and beads that people had left. We didn’t bring anything to leave in the box so we signed our names and put everything back.

Although I must admit that I felt rather lame looking for these things as normal people walked by, after finding the cache it was so much cooler. Its like you know a secret, you are in the know, and everyone else is oblivious.