Tag Archives: geography

Geocaching Revisited

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Hunting for hidden treasures.

Back in 2005, I discovered geocaching, an outdoor activity where people use a GPS to find hidden containers of trinkets. I wrote about my thoughts on the topic — and some big plans that never came to fruition — in some detail here. Because part of the game is to pull something out of a cache and replace it with something else, I started gathering items to share. Among these were some “travel bugs,” which are basically serial numbered tags you can affix to an item so it can be tracked. The tracking is mostly done on the Geocaching.com Web site. That’s also were you can find a list of geocaches just about anywhere in the U.S.

And that’s the interesting thing: these things are everywhere. Did you drive more than 10 miles to work today? I bet you passed at least a dozen of them within 3 miles of your car. There’s one a block from my house in Wickenburg and one 4/10 of a mile from my RV here in Quincy. As this map shows, they’re all over the place:

Geocaches Near Me
My RV is just about dead-center in this map. The little box and question mark icons indicate geocaches in the area. The smiley face icon is a geocache I found that I logged.

For some reason, I find the proliferation of these little boxes of hidden “treasure” fascinating. It emphasizes how big the world really is. It also reminds me a bit of a walk my husband, Mike, and I had along the rim of the Grand Canyon once. We got off the beaten path and walked right along the rim, far from where the tourists wander. We happened to stop for a rest on a rock outcropping. And there, tucked under an overhang with a beautiful view of the canyon, was an urn of cremated remains. How long had it been hidden there? We didn’t know. It was like an uncharted geocache. Seems like a good final resting place to me.

Geocaches are hidden. They’re tucked away in painted coffee cans, sealed lengths of black PVC pipe, and plastic Tylenol bottles. In the old days, ammo cans were popular, but I think the value of these has prevented their widespread use — too likely to be stolen if found. (I bought 3 nice-sized ammo cans from a seller in Beatty, NV some years back to create my own geocaches; I still have them.) Caches are hidden in bushes, under rocks, and among the remains of pioneer trash heaps. You’re not likely to stumble upon any of them by accident. You have to look for them. And even with GPS coordinates, they’re not always easy to find.

For some reason, I brought my bag of geocache goodies along with me on my trip to Washington this year. I guess I thought I’d try it again. I didn’t think much of it until the other day when a Twitter friend, @PlagiarismToday, started tweeting about his weekend geocaching activities. It got me thinking about it. I pulled out my bag and took a look inside it. I had a GPS with me, and an Internet connection to get information about local caches, so I had everything I needed to try again.

So I went out yesterday to search for three caches. I found three, but not the original three I’d set out to find.

  • Ryann’s Hide was the first cache I’d hunted for in over 5 years. Although I’m using a newer GPS (a Garmin GPSMap 60c) than I did in 2005, I soon realized that precision was something that needed patience. As I walked, the GPS would guide me, but I quickly overshot the location. Seems that the GPS could not keep up with my movement. I needed to slow down and let the signals catch up. Zooming in on the map gave me ever-increasing detail. Standing still, gave me ever-increasing precision. Once I caught on, I was able to zero in on the location. The cache was alongside a two-track road that led down a hill to a fishing spot. The road was closed to unauthorized vehicles. It started on the edge of an orchard and curved down into a very pleasant wooded area. (I think I need to explore further down that trail.) The container was a painted coffee can with a plastic lid. I pulled out a plastic car and replaced it with a tiny stuffed teddy bear. I entered my Geocaching.com user name in the log book, closed everything back up, and replaced it exactly where I’d found it. Success!
  • Quincy Valley Rest Area II was a bit easier to find — once I got on the correct side of the rest area fence. It was a nicely made cache container consisting of a short length of black PVC pipe with a screw-top on one end. Inside was a baggie with the logbook, some plastic dinosaurs, and a very nice shell. I took the shell and replaced it with an emery board with advertising for a nudist colony on it. (I really don’t remember where I got such a thing, but it is pretty funny — and clean.) I logged my visit and closed it all back up. Success!
  • West Bar Overlook is the one I really wanted to find. It’s located on Babcock Bench, high above one of the orchards I dried several times this summer. The entry on Geocaching.com provided lots of photos and information about the geologic significance of the spot. I’d brought along my camera, planning to get some shots from its perfect vantage point. Unfortunately, the two-track access road that appeared to link the cache area with pavement was inaccessible. Not only was there a locked gate across the road, but there were lots of tall weeds making the start of the trail a bit questionable for someone wearing shorts during snake and tick season. I’ll either try again next spring, before the weeds grow so tall or possibly try to visit via helicopter. I already scouted the power lines in the area. So this was a failure.
  • Rust Everywhere was my consolation prize. I’d already imported its GPS coordinates into my GPS, so I knew approximately where it was. But because I hadn’t planned to look for it, I didn’t have the details — like a basic description of what it looked like. Having a location but no description makes things a bit tougher. Patience and perseverance paid off, though. The cache was a label-less Tylenol bottle hidden well among rocks. I pulled out a kid’s hair clip and replaced it with a computer chip, logged my visit, and put it back. Success!

In all, it was a nice way to spend the afternoon. I was at it for about two hours and it got me out and about. To onlookers, I must have looked pretty silly, walking around while studying a GPS. But I got to find a neat place — that wooded trail — and get some exercise and fresh air. I hope to do more tomorrow.

I also think that it would be a great family or small group activity. A way to combine socialization with exercise. Working together to complete a challenging task.

I do have a geocaching project lined up. I’m going to release one of my travel bugs into the wild with the mission of traveling down to New Orleans, LA. That’s where @PlagiarismToday lives and does his geocaching. He, in turn, is going to send one my way. We’ll see which one completes its mission first.

I’ll likely blog about the progress here.

The Big Detour Map

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Annotated map to my most recent flight around the Cascades.

I wrote about my long flight around the Cascades here; this sectional chart shows the actual route with points of interest. You can click the map to get a larger view without the annotation letters.

Big Detour Map

A – Starting point in Auburn, WA, a suburb of Seattle.
B – The first canyon I attempted to fly though. I climbed above the clouds when I turned around to backtrack.
C – My first descent back below the clouds.
D – Where I hooked up with Route 12.
E – My big scare in the clouds. I was less than 5 miles from the pass.
F – The ridge I crossed to descend to the Columbia River Gorge area.
G – The Dalles, where I refueled.
H – Skirting around very low clouds.
I – Skirting around a restricted area.
J – Mattawa, where I had lunch with a friend.
K – Quincy, where the helicopter is based for my first contracts.

In the 3-1/2 hours I flew that day, I could have been 1/3 of the way back to Arizona.

E25 to BFI by Helicopter on Google Earth

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My four-day trip, plotted.

I’m a geek. Everyone should know that. This just proves it again.

I use a gps logger to track my GPS coordinates when I’m out and about taking photos, mostly so I can geotag my photos. But on long flights, I often turn the GPS logger on and let it collect my coordinates as I fly. The logger I use has a huge memory and was actually able to accumulate GPS coordinates for my entire helicopter flight from Wickenburg, AZ to Seattle, WA.

Helicopter Flight on Google EarthThe image shown here shows the four days of my flight. Day 1 was Wickenburg to Page, AZ. Day 2 was a photo flight on Lake Powell followed by a flight from Page, AZ to Bryce Canyon, UT. Day 3 was Bryce Canyon, UT to Salt Lake City, UT and then on to Yakima, WA. Day 4 was a bit of scud running to get to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, from Yakima to Seattle, WA.

If you’d like to look at the track points in detail on your copy of Google Earth, you can download them. They show altitude, too, so you can get an idea of how high or low we were for various stages of the flight. You can probably even do some kind of flyby if you have the right software.

Pretty cool, no?

John McCain’s Miracle Fence

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McCain uses his vast ignorance to mislead the public.

Lately, the radio here in Arizona has been full of commercials for John McCain. You know. That Senator from Arizona who gave Sarah Palin her ticket to wealth and fame? The man with the creepy smile who lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election? The man who’s trying hard to stay in the public eye by speaking out against everything our President is in favor of, even when the President’s plan would benefit his constituents?

John McCain: Angry Old ManYeah. That guy.

Although I usually switch channels when a McCain commercial comes on, I actually listened to one yesterday. It was old Johnny, talking about his immigration plan. And what pissed me off was his promises to “build a fence” along the Arizona – Mexico border.

I’ve flown the Arizona border in a helicopter 300 feet off the ground from Yuma to Nogales — a distance of 230 statute miles. (There’s another 100 miles of border beyond that before you get to New Mexico.) Although the first bunch of miles are flat and already have some sort of fence, there are long stretches of mountainous terrain where the erection of a fence would be downright impossible. The landscape is rocky and rugged with towering cliffs and tall peaks. Other than white markers positioned more than a mile apart, the border is impossible to see. (I actually slipped over to the Mexican side during the flight because I couldn’t see the next marker.) It’s Sonoran desert, home to cactus, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. There are few roads on the U.S. side. It would take a miracle to build a fence there — and if one were constructed, it would be a crime against nature.

Arizona-Mexico Border

Yet John McCain continuously promises to build this miracle fence, leading people who haven’t seen the border first hand — 99+% of the population, including, no doubt, John McCain himself — to believe that such a task is not only possible, but it’s reasonable.

It’s neither.

In fact, even attempting such a feat would be a blatant misuse of public funds. Arizona’s own “Bridge to Nowhere.”

I believe that the Arizona-Mexico border is impossible to fully secure. Even if fences were built, they’d be cut, tunneled under, or torn down — as they already are. Illegals will get into the country from Mexico. That’s a fact of life in Arizona. Don’t get the idea that it’s easy to get it; it’s not. But it is possible and it will always be so — just as it’s possible to get across the Canadian border. Building a fence will not deter those who are serious about crossing the border.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

But I do know that I’m sick of listening to John McCain mislead the American public into thinking that the solution is as easy as putting up a fence.

On Old GPSes and New Activities

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I discover geocaching and plan to take it to the extreme.

Years ago — I really don’t know how long — I bought a Garmin GPS 12Map. At this time, it was hot stuff. It was one of the first 12-channel receivers, which means it acquired satellites quickly and managed to hold enough of them in transit to be useful. It had a grayscale screen with a moving map. It had about 1.4 MB of memory, which you use to store detailed maps, so that detail would be available when you were using it. Although it didn’t talk to my Mac, it did talk to my PC. I downloaded Garmin maps into and uploaded waypoints and routes from it to another, more detailed software package.

I used it a lot. This was before I seriously got into flying and I had my Jeep, which we used to take on back roads once in a while. We’d load up the maps for where were were going and take a drive. We always knew exactly where we were and could consult the map to find our way in or out of a location. We also knew the names of all the land forms and other named places we passed.

I also used it for horseback riding. The GPS had an automatic tracking feature. I’d start it up, clear the track log, and attach it to my saddle, antenna side up. It would faithfully record every twist and turn in the trail. When I got to a gate, I’d mark it as a waypoint. Then, when I got back to my office, I’d upload the route information to the mapping software and display the horse trail on a topographic map. Do that a few times on all different trails and, before you know it, you’ve mapped all the trails on a topo map. Cool.

Although I stopped using the GPS regularly, I never really stopped using it. (Not like I stopped using my Palm or my Newton. But let’s not go there, huh?) Most recently, back in September, I pulled it out, loaded a few topo maps into it, and took it on a driving trip on the north side of the Grand Canyon. (I’m pretty sure I wrote about that trip in these blogs somewhere, probably in the “Travels with Maria” category.) Basically, any time I plan to take the Jeep off pavement, I bring the GPS, loaded with appropriate topo maps, with me. I have mounting hardware in the Jeep and a cable that provides power to the GPS. So as long as the engine’s running, I don’t have to worry about batteries.

For the record, I don’t use the GPS to drive from point A to point B on paved roads. If you need a GPS to do highway or city driving (“Turn left here.”), you really shouldn’t be driving. Take a cab or hire a chauffeur. Or ride Greyhound, and leave the driving to them. Or learn how to read a damn map!

Now, five or more years later, my GPS is outdated. Sure, it still does what it always did, but there are so many more GPSes out there with so many more features and so much more power. Color screens, more than 50 MB of memory, more waypoints, etc. For the past year or so — actually, every time I take out the GPS and use it — I think about how nice it would be to store 100 topo maps instead of just 4 or 5. That would certainly save a lot of trips to the PC in my office, just to load up maps. I could load all the maps I normally need and have that detail every time I went out.

But I don’t use it all that much and I can’t really justify the expenditure of $400 to $500 for the latest version of a “toy” I already have. (Hey, at least I could write paying articles about the iPod Photo.) So I haven’t replaced it.

Then I discovered geocaching. Wow, what a silly sport. Person A takes a weatherproof container that can be as small as a film canister or as large as an ammo can and fills it with trinkets like tiny stuffed animals, keychains, stickers, and beads, adds a small notepad with a pencil, marks it as a geocache, and hides it somewhere. He then takes the GPS coordinates (several times, to make sure they’re right) and publishes them on a Web site like www.geocaching.com, along with a name for the cache and a description or hints. Person B, having nothing better to do with his time, gets those GPS coordinates off the Web site and looks for the cache. When he finds it, he removes one relatively worthless item — perhaps the keychain — and replaces it with another relatively worthless item — perhaps a pin-on button. He also makes a note or two in on the notepad and then, when he’s back in front of his computer, he logs his find.

It may sound easy, but it isn’t. I went in search of one yesterday, just to see if I could find it. Named “Airport,” it was on the side of the road, not far from Wickenburg Airport. We zeroed in within 40 feet, stopped the Jeep, and got out to look. Unfortunately, our wet winter had resulted in tall grass and weeds that are now dead and likely hiding places for snakes. We arrived not long after sunset, while it was still dark, and cautiously searched the brush. At one point, my GPS told me I was within 4 feet. But I just couldn’t find it and I wasn’t prepared to push aside dead grass to look harder for it. So we let it go. I’ll try again another day, when I’m better prepared with a stick, a gun full of snake shot, boots, and gloves.

What I like about the idea of geocaching is the challenge of it and the fact that it forces you to go outdoors and explore off pavement. This alone is a good reason for people to do it. Think of all those mall walkers, trying to get exercise by walking in the mall. Now take off their walking shoes and replace them with hiking shoes, give them a GPS, and tell them to find a cache. They’re still getting exercise, but they’re breathing fresh air. They’re also seeing trees and bushes and grass and sky and maybe a few animals rather than whatever’s playing in mall shop windows. And there’s no Starbucks to lure them in for a mochachino. The terrain may be a bit more rugged and not suitable for some of the less steady folks, but I think it could work for lots of people. And even if they don’t find it, they’ll still probably have some fun.

I can imagine it now: five women and a man aged 60 to 75, out in the desert on a trail. They’re wearing sweatsuits that they bought in Wal-Mart, one of them has a sweatband around her head, and another has a walking stick she bought at the Grand Canyon. One woman, the tallest, is holding the GPS up, looking at it through the lenses of her half-frame glasses. (She got the GPS away from the man early on, when it was clear to her that he couldn’t program it.) “It’s this way,” she announces, pointing to her left. The group starts walking.

But seriously, it seems like an interesting activity and a great excuse to get outdoors.

Of course, I’ve started thinking of making it really challenging, not by hiding the cache in tall, potentially snake-filled weeds at the side of the road, but by placing it in a location that’s difficult to get to. A location with no roads or trails. A location that — you guessed it — is accessible by helicopter.

I call it extreme geocaching and it’s for people who need an excuse to go beyond the boundaries of civilization, to places no one ever goes.

All the cache locations would be within a mile of a Jeep-accessible road, but there may not be trails to get to them. It would take real skill and determination to reach them. But it would be worth it, not only for achieving a difficult goal, but for the destination itself. You see, the GPS coordinates wouldn’t take you to a bush or hollow tree. They’d take you to an interesting site with ruins, abandoned buildings, swimming holes, or hot springs. Someplace to explore. And you wouldn’t find dime-store novelties in the caches — there would be stuff with value, like current maps, books, flashlights, CDs, and gift certificates.

There would, of course, be a safe helicopter landing zone within a quarter mile of each of the caches. That would make extreme geocaching the perfect helicopter sport.

Of course, I feel pretty silly talking about extreme geocaching when I can’t even find a metal container on the side of route 60 just outside of Wickenburg.

Anyway, if you have an interest in geocaching, visit the Geocaching Web site. You can enter a zip code near the top of the Home page window to search for caches near you. I was amazed to find that there are about 6 of them within half a mile from my house. (We’ll take the horses out to find them when the weather cools down a bit.)

And if you live in Arizona and want a real challenge, keep checking in here. I expect to establish my first extreme geocache later this month. Use the comments link for this entry if you have any suggestions for what the cache should include. Keep in mind that my budget is $100.