The 21st century is filled with unhealthy, lackadaisical people who are out of touch with nature. It has gotten to the point where instead of going out into the woods for adventure’s sake, we’ve started to invent games just to entice people to leave the house. One of those games is called geocaching. I quite enjoy it, and so should you.
The premise is simple. Someone hides a box in the woods, and someone else goes to find it and proves they did so by signing a log book. There are also miscellaneous knick-knacks in the box that a finder can take as long as they leave something else. There is nothing quite like opening an ammo box in the middle of the woods and finding a worn-out Troll Doll next to half a yo-yo.
Part of what makes geocaching fun is the sense that you're a part of a secret organization. There is now a new world that others don’t know about: the coordinates to every geocache. What would have been just a boring stroll through the park turns into an engaging search for a cleverly hidden box that may contain something of interest.
It also takes you to places you would never otherwise go. Many geocaches are hidden in areas of interest such as old memorials, scenic parks and historical sites. Sometimes, learning about the site a geocache is in will help lead to its discovery.
Another important element of geocaching is that it takes time to find a cache. Sometimes it only takes a couple a minutes, and other times as long as a couple hours. But this isn’t to geocaching’s detriment. Taking time to find a cache allows you to soak in the ambiance of your location. It lets you connect with nature perhaps more than if you were just strolling through a park’s trail. You have to literally get your hands dirty as you overturn rocks, scour through underbrush and check behind trees.
While it may not give you an appreciation of nature, geocaching will certainly leave you with an understanding of nature’s physicality. I once slogged through a bog for a whole hour just to find one particularly well-hidden cache. But not all geocaches have to be a physical challenge.
Clever hiders will put a geocache in plain sight but with a puzzle to unlock it. There are also multi-part and mystery caches that go to some insane lengths to pose interesting challenges to the finder. Ancient maps, radio transmissions and magnets are just some of the tools I’ve seen used.
Geocaching is a interesting way to spend your time in the park and may be just the reason you need to get off the couch and go outside. It can be done with friends or alone, and all it takes is a modern smartphone or GPS, a pen for log signing and access to the geocaching website. It is completely free and fun. You could even go out and hide your own cache if you wanted. There are no risks to trying it out, and I absolutely recommend that you do.
