All you need for this travel-oriented hobby is a GPS unit, Internet access, and a sense of adventure.
By Wilt and Barbara Greenwood, F200764
March 2009
Geocaching is the modern equivalent of the treasure hunt game many of us played as children, with the addition of global positioning system (GPS) technology. It’s so new that until May 2000, the sport never existed. Up until then, the accuracy of civilian GPS receivers had been intentionally degraded because of governmental concerns that they could be used to pinpoint bombing targets. Better accuracy in home receivers was allowed, however, on May 2 of that year. One day after the change, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer placed what would become the world’s first geocache beside a back road near his home in Beaver Creek, Oregon, and posted its coordinates on the Internet.
The first person to find that cache, Mike Teague, expanded the concept to pull together the experiences of numerous other hiders and finders around the world onto a single Web page. His idea was furthered by a young man named Jeremy Irish, who developed the first full-function site devoted to geocaching, www.geocaching.com, on September 2, 2000.
By that time there were 75 known caches in the world; as of January 2009 the number had increased to more than 712,000. So if you’re ready to start hunting, you’ll have plenty of places to look.
To find the coordinates for a cache, go to geocaching.com, or a similar site, and select one or more caches you would like to find. From a computer, print out the cache description, as well as any clues that may be furnished, and note the latitude and longitude of each cache.
When you’re ready to hunt for the cache, enter the latitude and longitude coordinates directly into your GPS. The printed cache description, together with the map shown on the cache page, will point you to the neighborhood of the cache. Drive, walk, or otherwise get near the general vicinity before starting a detailed search. Once you’re near the cache, the arrow on the GPS receiver screen will take you to within a few feet of the object. Refer to the description and any clues to hone in on it.
After spotting the container, open it. You can take a small trinket from the cache and leave a similar trinket in return, or just sign the logbook that is always present in a cache. Next, go back to the Web site for this particular cache and log your visit.
This whole procedure may sound ridiculously simple, and indeed, many caches are easy to find. A large number are not so easy, however; camouflage techniques have become quite sophisticated as the sport has developed. Also, the hunt may be made more difficult by such variations as multi-caches, where each cache gives the coordinates for the next until the final one is reached; or puzzle caches, where the final coordinates are available only after solving some sort of riddle or puzzle, such as a Sudoku grid.
Size is also a factor in difficulty. While many caches are as large as an ammo can or food storage container, some may be micro caches, which are at least as small as a 35mm film canister. Nano caches can be the size of a pencil eraser.
Caches on Geocaching.com are rated from one to five stars depending on the difficulty of finding the cache and the difficulty of the surrounding terrain. A finding difficulty of less than two stars usually means it’s a quick park-and-grab cache, while a five-star rating may involve several weeks of work, often with two or more teams collaborating. A terrain difficulty of one star is generally handicapped-accessible, but a four-star rating will necessitate some pretty strenuous hiking or climbing, and a five-star terrain rating will usually require some sort of special equipment, such as rock-climbing gear or scuba tanks.
Geocaches are located just about everywhere around the world. They can be found in the middle of densely populated cities and on back roads and wilderness trails. If you search on Geocaching.com using FMCA’s Round Bottom Road location as a center point, for example, you’ll find a list of up to 92 caches within a five-mile radius. We have found nearly 2,500 caches in every state (except Hawaii) and in most Canadian provinces, as well as a couple in Mexico. The opportunities are endless. Our geocaching “handle” is Team Toad, by the way, if you want to check our recent finds on the Geocaching.com site.
We agree with Gypsy Journal publisher and author Nick Russell, who wrote, “Combining outdoor activity, the kind of technical toys that all guys love, low entry costs, exercise, and opportunities all over the country, geocaching may well be the perfect hobby/sport for RVers.” One more reason we find the sport attractive is that it takes you to spots that you never would have visited otherwise. We’ve been to a huge dome out in the desert that turned out to be a capped-off Titan missile silo; a small shrine several hundred feet into a cornfield that marked the site of Buddy Holly’s fatal plane crash; an abandoned silver mine just outside Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona; and countless other interesting places far removed from the usual tourist attractions.
If you decide to try this fun sport, you won’t be alone among RVers. There is an FMCA chapter for geocachers, the Eastern Area Geoc0achers. And no, that zero (“0”) in the middle is not a mistake; it’s meant to signify that we are cachers who coach (or coachers who cache, or something like that). Don’t be misled by the “Eastern Area” in our name, either. Although we’re chartered in FMCA’s Eastern Area, membership is open to all FMCA members.
A few words about equipment: you’ll need some. Obviously, since the whole sport begins with cache location information obtained from the Internet, you will need some sort of Internet access. It’s possible to do some caching using borrowed or public Internet access points, but if you’re going to get serious about it, you should have your own means to access the Web, via a computer or an Internet-capable cell phone.
Other than access to the Internet, the only real necessity is a handheld GPS receiver. Some dash-mounted GPS receivers may have limited geocaching capability, but they tend to be awkward to use and to carry. Get a hand-held GPS that is designed for navigation on foot; it will be worth it. Prices range from a little less than $100 to more than $500, depending on the bells and whistles you get. Units at the low end of the range work fine, but if you want to spend a little more, get one that is capable of holding and displaying map data along with a symbol for the geocache. Seeing the cache superimposed on a map often makes the hunt a lot easier.
You don’t really need anything else to be a serious cacher, but other goodies tend to get accumulated along the way (at least for us), such as topological maps, compasses, hiking poles, Swiss Army knives, Leatherman tools, etc. All of these may prove helpful for various types of caches. Don’t buy them until you need them, though. The vast majority of caches don’t require them.
For more detailed information about geocaching, there is no better original resource than the aforementioned Geocaching.com Web site. You need to join the site to get most of the information, but a basic membership is free. Premium membership with extended privileges is available for a small fee. You also can type the word “geocaching” into the Google search engine or look up the Wikipedia article “” extensive information is available from both. A good book to help you get started is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Geocaching by Jack W. Peters (Alpha Press, $16.95), available at Amazon.com or any of the major bookstores. Also, members of FMCA’s Geoc0achers chapter would be glad to discuss the sport with anyone who would like to know more.
Geoc0achers chapter members have presented a seminar about geocaching called “Introduction to Geocaching 101” at FMCA international conventions and several area rallies. At this month’s convention in Perry, Georgia, March 16 through 19, we will present two seminars: “Introduction to Geocaching 101” and a new one, “Advanced Geocaching 201.” Please check the “Great Georgia Getaway” convention program for seminar dates and times.
Geocaching is a great hobby. It gets you out of the motorhome and adds to every adventure you take. We hope to see you in Perry, or down the road, searching for the next cache.