It started in a Hog’s Breath car park, in the middle of a Friday afternoon. My girlfriend directed me towards a tree, the compass on her phone spinning around and pointing towards it as we explored the surrounding area. It was a clear day, and the GPSguided compass claimed accuracy within one meter. I was searching for my first geocache, becoming part of a global phenomenon I had heard mentioned in hushed conversation for years. We found the cache fast – a small plastic container, containing a log book and a pencil for us to ‘check in’ with. We wrote the date and our usernames, logged the find on the app with a few comments, and set off for the next one.
This simple search on a lazy afternoon was enough to open my world up a little bit wider. There’s a scene in Men in Black II where a memory-wiped Jay, having just re-discovered the existence of aliens, walks out onto the street and suddenly realises that everyone walking past him on the sidewalk at that moment is a disguised alien. Getting into geocaching is a little like that – suddenly every tree, every bush, every alleyway and unassuming corner of your neighbourhood begins to look like a hiding place. Geocaching is framed as a sort-of secret activity – you’re forbidden from telling passers-by, called ‘muggles’ (in lingo plagiarised from Harry Potter), what you’re doing. Geocaching is built on trust, as theoretically users are free to log caches on their apps without actually finding them. But if you take the game seriously, hunting geocaches can be a thoroughly engrossing way of exploring your surroundings, and of connecting with a massive community of similarly-minded hunters.
BURIED TREASURE
The first geocaches started popping up around the world around 2000, after Selective Availability – an intentionally implemented tool for degrading global satellite strength, implemented by the US government for national security reasons – was switched off. Dave Ulmer, a GPS enthusiast living in Beavercreek, Oregon, was the first to hide a cache, giving members of a GPS forum he frequented the coordinates of a black bucket he had hidden in some nearby woods. The original idea was that people would find this bucket and trade items within it – you could take whatever was placed in there, but you were asked to leave something behind as well. This is still the case with many modern caches, which are often filled with stickers or toys to be swapped. Now, of course, a lot of us are carrying powerful GPS devices with us at all times. There are over two and a half million caches hidden worldwide, and most people track them using phone apps. Once you’ve downloaded the app and set up a username, it can automatically tell you of any logged caches in your general area. Each listing contains a description, exact coordinates, details on the difficulty of the find and the size of the container. People can post photos or clues to help hunters, and everyone who finds the cache will log their experience, like signing an online guest book. You’re encouraged to let the cache creator know if it has gone missing or been damaged – geocaching is essentially run entirely by the people who engage with it rather than a governing body, which has fostered an atypically nurturing and friendly community.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX
There are a few different kinds of cache out there. Quite a few are simple, hidden under rocks or in fairly plain sight, while others are incorporated into architecture, hidden away in car parks and bus stops. Some are multi-parters, each cache containing part of a riddle that must be solved to find the final cache, while other simply give you clues once you arrive at the specified location, requiring you to puzzle them out. They vary wildly in difficulty, with some cache hunters content to search for the easy ones, while others go for the more infamous caches – one, for instance, requires visiting several different airports around Australia to piece everything together and find the final cache. A cache series in my local area asks the cache hunter to explore the hidden nooks and crannies of various local shopping centers (where there is a high chance of ‘muggle’ activity if you go searching at the wrong time of day). Another one at Tailem Bend, SA, requires searching through a bucket of golf balls to find the one ball that contains the log, on which you’re meant to record how many balls you searched through before finding the right one.
CACHING WITH FRIENDS
The international popularity of geocaching has led to numerous events and gatherings popping up all over the world, dedicated to finding and discussing caches. I spoke with Mark Hamilton and Gayle Dolphin, collectively known as Team Flipper, who organised a national gathering for geocachers around Easter this year in Murray Bridge, SA. “There was around 900 people at the Easter event, ages ranged from the very young to people in their 60s and some older”, says Mark. “There were people with a variety of backgrounds, and we had people from all over the world: USA, Canada, NZ, Hong Kong, Germany, about forty people from overseas. We also had people from every state in Australia attending.” The pair started caching in 2007, before smartphones really took off, after being told about it while updating their GPS. “The next day we looked up the web site, entered our home coordinates and went in hunt of our first find, but it was an epic fail”, Gayle recalls. “Mark returned in daylight and found it, then he then took me back to show me what we had been hunting for. We were instantly hooked. Now we mainly use our smart phones when we have time to geocache in the city, but when we go into the bush we need to load up the GPS.” Since then the pair have found 5066 caches, across every state in Australia and twelve other countries. That’s a level of dedication well beyond the time and effort put into most impressive gaming feats, and it has connected them with many other people who cache. “We went to the USA in 2010 for the Midwest Geobash in Ohio”, says Mark. “Several people came to Australia in 2010 and we all became friends. It’s a good way to travel and connect with people.”
MEMORABLE MOMENTS
Since my first cache find, a handful of others have stuck out as particularly exciting: the first cache I found alone, a multi-part cache that directed me to several different examples of local fauna, and a particularly fiendish one that was attached within the frame of a fence gate, meticulously crafted and hidden in such a manner that it was absolutely inconspicuous to the naked eye. I never would have found it if I didn’t know the cache’s creator, Mark Kleine, and hadn’t been given several hints. Mark discovered geocaching on a Cub Scouts excursion with his kids, and in the last eighteen months he has found 435 caches while crafting ten of his own. “I had the idea that I should start putting some out there, to give back to the community that had put them out there for me to find”, he says. When Mark (or anyone else around the world) posts a cache location, it’s up to a team of volunteer reviewers to approve it. They check coordinates submitted through Google Maps, then communicate with the person posting to make sure that they can maintain the cache if anything happens to it. Caches will be rejected if they are too close to other caches, if they are unsafe, or if they are on private property. It’s a big task to review every submission, but there’s a lot of communication among the community to ensure integrity.
GAME FACE
As a ‘game’ (which is what geocaching is explicitly referred to as on geocaching.com, the repository for all caches), geocaching lacks clearly defined rules for any sort of victory. But it does have very strict criteria for how it is played, and how caches are logged and made available. The real goal of geocaching, then, is to gain a better sense of your surroundings, to explore, to simply enjoy yourself. It’s a form of psychogeography for many who undertake it, a game that allows them to better explore and understand their environment, to find the fun undercurrent of urban settings and to explore their surroundings. In my time caching I have explored local parks and playgrounds, dug through tree stumps, walked along paths I have previously only ever driven past. “Geocaching has taken me and my family to areas that we would not have otherwise gone to”, says Mark Kleine. “I think the key to hiding a really good geocache is not only in the hide, but in the location you take the person to. And if that’s a spectacular clifftop somewhere, or a little hidden park or garden that you might drive by every day and never know what’s there, then that’s the joy of it, I think.” The full version of the official Geocache app is $12.99 on the App Store – a small price to pay for entry into a game that remains, for the general population, hidden in plain sight.