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A cache is right here believe it or not.
Geocaching is a personal hobby, one that’s arisen on numerous occasions so far.
Anawon Rock
Massasoit State Park
The Gertrude Boyden Wildlife Refuge
For any muggles reading this, geocaching is a worldwide treasure hunt of sorts. Participants hide caches, usually in parks or deep woods although the urban environment is not unheard of. There’s one particular micro-cache on Thayer Street in Providence that has left several stymied, and the buildings in Boston make getting an accurate GPS fix a near impossibility.
Once you find the coordinates off the geocaching website (which is free to join) the only other requirement is a handheld Global Positioning System. As with all technology, they keep adding new features and the prices continue to go down. We’re not to the point of the ten dollar VCR with these gadgets yet but it’s not inconceivable in the future. Further, some new cell phones have GPS capability, in which case no extra equipment is necessary.
But since the main thrust of these articles is park related we’ll focus on those rather than the urban environs. Most geocachers are fairly considerate, placing their drops only a short bush-whack off of fairly well maintained paths. Others are more insidious, lodged in tall trees or amidst a copse of briars.
So what’s in it for me you might ask? Well, every cache has some amount of treasure inside whether it be a refrigerator magnet or a brand new super-ball. Geocaching is not for the greedy really, it’s more of an epicurean pursuit. The point is the journey, finding a small Tupperware container amidst a fifty foot rock wall or camouflaged inside of a fallen elm tree.
Some geocachers can lay claim to finding hundreds of these locations, others are more conservative, geocaching only on the odd weekend afternoon, but either way it offers an opportunity to explore parks you might never have known about. It throws another incentive to braving the great outdoors, and some of the caches involve riddles, serving to challenge the mind as well as the stamina.
Tuesday, July the 21st there will be a geocaching question and answer forum at the Brewster Ladies Library from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. Sure it’s a decent trek from Providence, being near the elbow of Cape Cod, but it’s certain to be packed with tons of relevant info for the newbie and the old salt as well.
For those interested in diving right in, the Great Northern Tier Geocaching Tournament 2009 will be held on August 15th in Leominster, MA. Coordinates will lead through the region’s forests and parks and for those who complete the challenges there will be prizes (not to mention bragging rights).
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