GeoCaching

About a week ago I heard of a game that has apparently been going on for several years called GeoCaching. The idea is people hide little 'treasure' boxes out in the woods, then post the GPS coordinates on Geocaching.com. Using a hand held GPS and a few clues provided by the person who hid the cache, you're supposed to find it and add your name to the log book inside. There are also little treasures inside that you can trade for. There are literally hundreds of thousands of these things hidden around the world.

I used the website to look up caches near home and wasn't too surprised to find there were quite a few in Quiet Waters Park. So I dug my old GPS receiver out of the closet, downloaded some new software into my PDA and set out Saturday afternoon for a bit of exploring. On my first trip out I was only looking for one cache called "Bight's Overlook". I followed the coordinates and arrived at a place I know I've walked past dozens of times before.

The clue provided in the description said to look for a specific kind of tree and it took me about ten minutes to find it. Sure enough, hidden away in a camouflaged hollow was a little plastic box with a green GeoCache label on top. I opened it up and looked through everything. Since I'm not sure I'll be taking this up as a hobby yet, I didn't remove anything. I did sign the logbook before I put everything back in the box and hid it away for the next person to find.

It was a very long walk, about twice the length of my usual trips over to Quiet Waters, but the weather was excellent and I enjoyed myself a lot more than I thought I would. I logged my find on the website and planed another outing for Sunday morning. This time I'd try for one in the Greenbury Point Nature Center. Greenbury Point is located right across the Severn River from the US Naval Academy and is owned by the US Navy. It was once the location of a submarine radio facility, but that was decommissioned many years ago and now its a nature preserve and sometime training ground for midshipmen.

I've always wanted to go visit this place, but until I saw it listed on the Geocaching website I didn't know it was open to the public. It turns out there are lots of wilderness trails and plenty of nature to be seen there. The first cache I had printed out was called "Trev's 'Cannon'" and the GPS led me to a spot just off the trail. I'm pretty sure I found the 'cannon' right away, but try as I might I just couldn't find the cache. After spending over half an hour hunting I finally gave up and headed down the trail looking for the next one.

When I got to the coordinates I just looked at the spot and said, "You have GOT to be kidding me." The coordinates were behind a little duck blind used for observing, well, ducks out on the creek. But there wasn't much land behind the little building, just a shear drop fifteen feet down to the muddy water. I'm not the most sure footed person alive and being there all by myself I could just see me trying to climb back up that embankment soaking wet and probably with a broken hip to boot. I let this one pass.

Not to be totally defeated I did have a really wonderful walk along the Poet's Trail. So called because of the little plaques every couple hundred feet along the way with quotations about nature and conservation. I saw some deer staring at me, lots of squirrels getting ready for winter, trees ablaze with autumn's last glory, and a few delicate flowers hanging on in hopes of one last bee stopping by. It was a nice walk, but the caching was frustrating. The jury's still out on whether I'll keep this up, but I guess I'll try it at least a couple more times.