Today was my first attempt at geocaching and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in hiking. The basic idea is that individuals and organizations set up hidden storage places (caches) in various places around the world and place the locations (lattitude and longitude) of the caches on a web site like geocaching.com. An interested adventurer or hiker can then visit the website, some hints about the cache, download the lattitude and longitude into their handheld GPS receiver, and head out on their search for the cache. Once found, the cache may contain a tupperware container with some gifts and a logbook.The visitor makes an entry in the logbook if they get something from the cache, they should replace it with something new. The visitor can also go back to geocaching.com and record their success and upload some pictures. The cache I visited was called Bridge Over Troubled Water. 

Bridge Over Troubled Water was located at 41° 21.087′ North – 75° 11.691′ West in Pennsylvania. The cache was established on February 3, 2003 and was named after the Simon & Garfunkle song of the same name. More details are at the website. I discovered the Bridge Over Troubled Water cache on geocaching.com by entering a zip code and desired mileage. The site showed my a half dozen that were within ten miles of 18426.

The Bridge Over Troubled Water cache is a virtual one because the Pennsylvania park service does not allow physical caches in the park system. There are various kinds of caches described as follows on geocaching.com. A traditional cache is the most common and usually consists of a tupperware container, ammo box, or bucket filled with goodies and a log book. A multiple cache has 2 or more caches. There are many variations, but most multi-caches have a hint to find the second cache, and the second cache has hints to the third, and so on. An offset cache (where you go to a location and get hints to the actual cache) is considered a multi-cache. A virtual cache is a cache that exists in a form of a location. Depending on the cache "hider," a virtual cache could be to answer a question about a location, an interesting spot, a task, etc. The reward for these caches is the location itself and sharing information about your visit.

I am giving some thought to where I might setup a cache myself. I’ll post information about it here in the weblog.