Those who have been following me know that I am a geocacher. Geocaching is a hobby where people go hide containers out in the world, recording the GPS coordinates and then get on geocaching.com and post the coordinates and other people try and find the containers using the coordinates. Geocachers both hide and find containers. Here is a help page at geocaching.com that explains it a lot better than I can on what the hobby is about and how to participate. There are two kinds of people in the world I have found. Those who once they find out what it is about find it fun and fascinating and those who find it pointless and illegal. I have been doing it for almost twenty years and I love it. I appreciate the generosity of the American taxpayers who have spent billions of dollars launching GPS satellites into orbit so i can find tupperware containers in the woods.

So this is an account of me finding a geocache last week. I haven’t done much finding this summer mainly because I have found almost all of them in my area and it’s been hot

So I started looking for the geocache near this playpark. This cache was a mystery cache that required me to solve an online jigsaw puzzle. I had been working a table at an environmental festival earlier that day so I wanted to get home, hydrate, and solve the puzzle in the comfort of my home A/C and cold drink in hand.

The tree and shadow behind the playpark.

So the next day I showed up with the coordinates and proceeded to head to what is called “ground zero” (aka GZ) the immediate area of the cache. GPS coordinates for civilian use are only accurate to +/- 15 ft or so geocaching is not just going to GZ and picking up the cache. You can end up looking for hours for it. One problem is that there is an art to getting accurate coordinates. It is not uncommon for objects to be 40 or 50 feet away from GZ. Anyway, I digress. This park had a food forest and a community garden. That was cool.

A shadowy tree

Entering the woods.

And a video of my search. I lucked out, the search only took me less than a minute and I didn’t encounter any snakes, spiders, wasps or other fun crawly things. In the container is a log book that you sign and date. Later, you get back online and log the find there as well. I have been to urgent care for several things in my geocaching career. Wasp stings lead the list, in Texas I got into a bunch of fire ants, I have had numerous thorn cuts. I have tripped and fallen, all sorts of fun stuff. Plus I have had several conversations with the police, sheriff’s deputies, and security guards about what I was doing and have encountered several unhoused people. In general, park authorities support geocaching because it gets people into remote areas of the parks. If I see signs of unhoused people living nearby then I just forget about the cache. The homeless have to live somewhere and I don’t want to upset them. Most of them just want to be left alone.

Walking back to the car, I came across this tree with a swirly shadow. If you look to the right sidebar of this page you will see a running count of my finds. This was my 2394th find. Sounds like a lot but I know people who have found more than ten times as many as that. I will kick up my activity later in the fall when the snakes go into their brumation.

So that’s an introduction to the world of geocaching. In geocacher circles, people who don’t know about geocaching are called muggles. From the Harry Potter book series where people who were not magicians were called muggles.

Sorry this took so long. I am linking with Shadow Shot Sunday.