Treasures of Geocaching

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Tracy and I sat down to prepare for our outing with my sister-in-law Shelly and her husband James, who were visiting from Kansas City. I must admit, I was a little skeptical about the thought of treasure hunting. James informed me that all we needed was a free membership with the website geocaching.com, and a hand held GPS unit or a GPS enabled smart phone. We then created an account and decided on a profile name. We were now ready to see what this treasure hunt was all about. We soon discovered it was a technology-driven game of hide and seek using global positioning satellites. Members are able to hide caches and log their coordinates for others to find. These hidden caches contain a log sheet for you to sign your profile name. Some cache containers are larger and contain “treasures” that you can trade for other items. Trackables are items that have special tracking codes so that you may track where they have been. Then there is the virtual cache, which is not a hidden object at all. These types of caches are usually historical landmarks or may just be places with an interesting view. To log these types of caches you must answer a question about the locale or post a picture of the specific landmark and post it to the website. Now that we had more of an idea of what we had gotten ourselves into, I was definitely more excited about the geocaching expedition that lay ahead.

We all decided we would like to hike in the area of Watson Lake, as none of us had hiked there before. I pulled up the page on the website where you are able to find hidden caches and was given many search options to choose from. I opted to search by state and scrolled down to Arizona and hit the “go” button. Twenty-three thousand five hundred and ninety-nine ...

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...scovered many types of treasures that day. The day read like a story from the book The Joy of Geocaching that I had started to read the night before. I must agree with the author’s statement that “Geocaching is a healthy and inexpensive way to get the whole family outdoors, energized, and pulling together for a common goal.(Gillen 9)” Judging from the good time our family had it will be something we continue to do in the future.

Works Cited

Madden, James. Personal Interview. 4 February 2012.

Madden, Shelly. Personal Interview. 4 February 2012.

Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site. Groundspeak, Inc. Web. 07 Feb. 2012. .

Gillin, Paul, and Dana Gillin. "Family Time." The Joy of Geocaching: How to Find Health, Happiness and Creative Energy through a Worldwide Treasure Hunt. Fresno, CA: Quill Driver, 2010. 9. Print.

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