As my one or two regular readers know I love geocaching. I haven’t done a whole lot of it lately because I’m the only one in the family that likes the sport. So I content myself with finding one or two while I’m out and about running errands. I find a lot when I’m traveling on business. My coworkers are very tolerant about it especially since they don’t have to participate.

The flip side of finding caches is hiding them for other people to find. 99% of the caches are straightforward. You go place the cache somewhere, post the location on the web site, and people go get them. Another type of cache is mystery caches. To find these you have to solve some sort of puzzle to find it. Not very many people try and find these because they can involve a lot of work to find. Most geocachers want to find lots of caches not just one. I like mystery caches though. I love puzzles.

SuperPizzaBoy and I created one called BOING. It has a little story associated with it about a nerd geocacher “Sonicboomer2” who is finding a cache at the top of the steeple of the Yogi family church just north of 71st and Mingo in Tulsa. He spots a jet piloted by the world’s richest geocacher, Ronald Dump (aka “dealboy163”) about to make an aerial cache drop.

I give the speed, altitude, and heading for the jet, and how long it took before it dropped the cache. Given all that the task is to go find the cache.

It took a while to make sure that my calculations were correct. Then we had to get a permit for the cache from city parks department, and then I had to take the geocachingdotcom cache approver through the calculations.

It takes some prettty good ciphering ability to do the calculations. In 3 and a half years 20 people have found it. It had gone unfound for over a year and this month three people found it.

I’ve done some other mystery type caches also. I’ve been working on one for downtown Tulsa for about 3 months now. It won’t involve any calculations but will take an eye for detail. It involves the zoo downtown and the zoo staff. Yep there are all sorts of critters downtown that nobody I’ve talked to has even noticed. Dolphins, bison, snakes, lizards, all sorts of birds, cattle, sheep, there is even a mystery creature, a winged wheel. The staff includes a doctor, a dentist, a shepard, a naked man and woman. Quite the show, and very few people seem to know what I’m talking about even though it is all in plain sight.

The energy boom and the resulting work has prevented me from doing all the spotting and coordinate work that I was doing at lunch. I think with the bust I won’t be working my lunch hour any more once we get through our backlog of projects.

So be looking for it early spring 2009.