Geocaching Getting Started
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.
