Treasure Hunting

Spring has arrived here with a vengeance, all the fruit trees are in bloom (such as the row of plums north of my office building, which today harbored a couple of acorn woodpeckers), so it’s time for trying new outdoor hobbies, namely geocaching. Geocaching is a pastime where people hide caches (often plastic kitchen containers, or sometimes 35mm film containers to make it more challenging) with a logbook and a few treasure items inside, and then publish the coordinates of the cache on the web. Others then go out equipped with a GPS and try to find the cache, and if so, sign the logbook and take and leave an item. Geocaching got started in May 2000, just after they stopped degrading the accuracy of GPS for non-military users (my favorite decision that Clinton ever made), and has grown tremendously since then: there are now close to 90,000 caches on all continents.

This evening we found our first cache, after a few unsuccessful tries this weekend. It can be quite a challenge to spot the cache. The GPS unit will usually get you to within 10 or so meters of the cache, but there can be a lot of hiding spots within that circle, especially if there’s thick ground cover.

We’re also interested in letterboxing, another treasure hunting hobby which predates GPSs by a good bit. In letterboxing you are given traditional treasure-hunting clues to find the letterbox. In the letterbox there is a rubber stamp (preferably created by hand) and a notebook, and you arrive with your own stamp and notebook. When you arrive at the letterbox, you stamp your own notebook with the stamp in the letterbox, and stamp the notebook in the box with your own stamp.