Geocaching Leather-man

I may be rather new at this whole game, but after less than 40 finds I have all ready found my favorite kinds of caches to go for and the ones I just ignore.

I started this for the exercise and not to try and out find or out number the next guy. A nice hike in a rural wooded area is right up my ally while lifting a lamp post skirt in a mall parking lot to find a magnetic key holder is a waste of time for me. Yes, I have found a couple of the lamp post micro caches just to see what they were like.

I have also cached in a couple of suburban parks and found that to be an OK experience it doesn’t come close to my preference of the deep, wooded hike where the chances of even seeing another person are pretty slim.

Perhaps in another 10 years or so when it becomes tougher to make the harder terrain hikes I will have a different attitude but for now this is the kind of place I like to do my caching.

Here’s another hike I took my grand kids on: 

They just loved the moss on the roots of this large tree where very few people have walked in the last few years. That not something you can experience hunting down micro caches in a parking lot. 

I first heard about geocaching on a television program about New York Outdoors.
They had a few people up in the Adirondacks with little electronic gadgets (GPRrs) looking for old military ammo boxes. It looked like fun so I looked up the term geocaching on the web and after finding the geocaching web site I began to read all I could.

It didn’t take long before I started hunting for the best GPSr unit I could find. I found a heck of a deal on Amazon for a Garmin Map 60c and ordered it.
Then I looked at the available software for working with the waypoints from the geocaching web site and settled on GSAK as it was a full featured product that was free to use but the author would disable a nag screen for a $20 contribution. After playing with it for a couple of days, I sent him the money as it would do every thing I needed and more.

The order from Amazon was going to take a couple of weeks to fill and I started getting antsy to try this whole thing out so with the aid of GSAK and reading the logs of several near by caches, I picked one out that I thought I could find and went out in early January to find it, sans a GPSr unit. It took a bit of hunting, but we found it, signed the log and came back home to log it on the geocaching web site.

The new GPS unit arrived at the end of January and we were off to the races, kind of. You see, we live in Upstate NY and when the unit came it was 5 degrees outside and we had about 3 feet of snow on the ground. I couldn’t just wait for warmer weather so I took a friend and we went to a county owned park about 40 miles from home as there was a introduction class into geocaching put on by the NY Geocaching Organization during a winter carnival there. By the time this event was to take place all the snow had melted and I wanted to meet some of the local cachers and try out my new toys. We went to the building where this class or introduction was to take place and we couldn’t find anyone to talk to about getting started. We milled around for about 15 minutes and decided to go out side where we fired up the GPSr and it showed us a cache about a quarter mile from where we were standing so off we went.

I didn’t prepare for doing this and had not read the description of the cache or any of the logs but we went for it any way. We didn’t see any path so we took off through the woods in search for the container that we new nothing about. It didn’t take long before the GPSr said that we were 10 feet away so we started looking around and there it was right in from of us under a log. We pulled it out, signed the log, I dropped of a little leather key ring and we closed it back up and hid it again. When I clicked on the “Found It” section of the GPSr so I would know which one to log when I got home, an option popped up “Go to Next”, I clicked that and another one showed up another quarter further away so we went for that one too.
It was another pretty easy find and my friend and I decided to call it a day and to meet up again to do it again some time.
When I arrived home and looked at the map of where we had been I saw that we could have driven the car to within 100 feet of both of these hides instead of hiking. I wanted to get into this for the hiking. When I go back to that park, where there are 15 more caches, to find the rest of the them I think I will find a central place to park and find them by hiking and not driving around for the quick grab.
Since that first day I have made up a special trinket to leave behind. Of course it’s a leather key ring with my caching name on it.

Before I go off on all of the different levels of geocaching and tools that are used I’ll start with the basics.

So, what is it?

It’s a game that involves the use of a Global Positioning System receiver (GPSr). Some one hides a container and records the latitude and longitude coordinates for the container. They then post that location on a web site. You see that posting and pull out a GPSr and go looking for the hidden object or cache.

Where is this web site?

geocaching.com

What’s the point of this activity?

For me, the point is to get out of the shop or office and back in the great outdoors to get some exercise. Others do it for the competition of finding more caches than the next person.

What is in the containers?

That depends on the size of each container. The largest ones may be five gallon buckets and the smallest ones could be little nitro pill containers. For the most part, they each have a log book or paper for you to sign to prove you were there. In the larger ones there are trade items like toys, coins, tools and personal signature items.

What kinds of things to you trade?

I always leave a leather key ring with my geocaching information on it and maybe a small toy or two. There are a lot of children that love to do this with their parents and finding a hidden box with a few toys to trade for can be exciting for them.

How hard is it to find a container?

The smaller the container, the harder. The best containers I have found so far are military surplus ammunition boxes. They may be pretty large, but hiding them is half of the fun. Some of them are hidden in hollow logs or under piles of rocks and others are camouflaged so well you can look right at them and not see them. The hunt is one of the best parts for me.

I’ve been wanting to set this Blog up for a year or so and now have a reason to get started with it.
Stay tuned for updates of my geocaching adventures and the ramblings of a leather-man.