Page 64 - South Mississippi Living - February, 2018

SPORTS & OUTDOORS free family fun
GEOCACHING:
High Tech Scavenger Hunt
story and photos by Frank Wilem
EA typical small cache container very day you pass by
hidden caches. We all do. They’re everywhere, yet many are unaware. When the weather gets cool, summer activities
like swimming or water skiing lose their appeal. Yet down here in the South, we have many sunshiny days in the 60s and 70s throughout the winter. On such days, we often find ourselves exhibiting cabin fever syndrome
and long to enjoy the outdoors, particularly those of us with kids. Geocaching is a perfect hobby for such occasions and a unique way to enjoy the outdoors.
Geocaching involves the search for hidden caches. Started in 2000, it has grown to over 3 million geocaches spread across 190 countries. Gulfport alone has nearly 2000 caches! Geocaching is the world’s largest treasure hunting game. Some caches are small like 35mm film canisters,
while others are larger such as ammo boxes that contain a log along with toys and travel bugs. Geocachers are encouraged to bring along items to swap for other items of their choice in these larger caches.
Some caches are multi-part and require finding more than one site, often requiring information such as dates on headstones or historical markers to be used to compute the coordinates for the next stage of the cache.
Using the Geocaching.com app, current smart phone technology offers sufficient position-fixing accuracy to locate caches without the need for a GPS. Our first cache was located in a cemetery near our house and looked like a two-inch long scuba tank. After unscrewing the end of the container, we retrieved the tiny log inside, signed our user name and dated it, and then carefully returned it to its hiding spot. We then created a free account on the
Cache log
Groundspeak website and logged our find. This site keeps track of the caches you’ve found and even those you tried but failed to find.
The app will tell you about caches near your current location. Available information includes the difficulty of finding it, how hard it is to reach, a description, hints, and logs of other Geocachers. We find these logs very useful to avoid searching for caches that have been “muggled.” Muggles,
a term originally coined in the Harry Potter books, are non-Geocachers who sometimes find and remove caches.
Oftentimes we search for caches along the way as we travel. Some are hidden at rest stops on the interstate while others are off in the middle
of the woods. We discovered many interesting places such as Spindletop while in Beaumont, Texas, for my daughter’s Karate match. In 1901, an oil well opened a giant oil field that produced 100,000 barrels of oil per day
64 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • February 2018
FOR MORE REFLECTIONS OF THE GULF COAST >> www.smliving.net
A large ammo-box-style cache with items to swap and travel bugs.