Geocaching on FS and NPS land

“Geocaching
by Jeff Frawley
Forest Magazine Spring 2005

Chuck Valnue checks his handheld Global Positioning System unit and plods through the thick blackberry vines and stinging nettles that blanket the ground. According to the unit’s electronic distance gauge, he is within twenty feet of his destination. It is time to get serious.

The coordinates 43 N, 123 W mark his location: a small patch of woods bordering a rest area outside Cottage Grove, Oregon. Just beyond the wooded area, travelers inspect maps unfolded against the hoods of their cars and road-weary children scatter across the lawn, tossing balls and Frisbees. A middle-aged man and woman walk an inquisitive black dog that sniffs at the tall grasses edging the forest.

Cars zoom past on nearby Interstate 5 as Valnue crouches to overturn mossy logs and flat rocks. The dog walkers pause and eye him suspiciously. He notices and rises, casually scratching his shaved head as if lost on a hike in the forest. “The trick is not to let people see you doing this,” he says in a low voice. “They start to wonder what’s over here, and they come and ruin everything.”

Valnue, known online as “Seal Rock George,” is dressed in a spotless white T-shirt and tan cargo shorts. He hardly looks the covert type. With an easy smile and friendly demeanor, he resembles an outdoorsy Garth Brooks rather than James Bond.

As the couple loses interest and walks away, Valnue carefully prods a stack of logs and bark. The pile is too ordered, too perfect. He digs through the wood and finds a plastic Folgers coffee container wrapped in camouflage duct tape. “There it is,” he says, shaking the container. “There’s the treasure.” Grinning, he unscrews the lid and exposes the contents within: one miniature Barbie doll, a crumpled Pampers diaper (unused), a pair of dice and a tiny notebook sealed in a sandwich bag.

Valnue has just unearthed the latest entry on his 400-count life list of found geocaches. In this high-tech version of hide-and-seek, participants hide small containers filled with knickknack fortunes, and then post the geographical coordinates of the caches on Internet forums. Anyone can hide—and find—a cache, provided they sign the logbook in the container and hide the cache back in the same spot. For public land managers like the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, geocaching is a new kind of recreation, and one that brings with it new controversies.

As soon as a new cache is posted, fervent cachers hit the trail in search of treasure. The first to log a find earns bragging rights; competitors banter in online forums over who “got firsties.”

Geocaching became possible in May 2000, when the Clinton administration ended a government-imposed degradation of the GPS signal. Until that time, in order to protect military communication, the government scrambled satellite signals for commercially available GPS units, rendering them accurate only to 100 yards. When the degradation signal was lifted, commercial units became accurate to twenty feet.

Two days after the signals were unscrambled, Seattle resident Dave Ulmer hid a container of goodies outside of Portland, Oregon, for his friends to find using their GPS units. After that first expedition, they started an online newsgroup, launching the spread of geocaching. Nearly five years later, more than 150,000 cache sites have emerged in all fifty states and in more than 200 countries. What began as a quirky and friendly challenge has now left its mark worldwide, from the “Dracula’s Castle Cache” concealed near the spooky legend’s supposed haunting grounds in Romania to the long list of caches hidden around U.S. Army bases in Iraq.

Geocachers find treasures in nearly all types of terrain, including urban caches hidden in city parks and around buildings. While most caches are found on public land, many have been allowed on private lands with the owners’ permission. Geocaching.com, the activity’s leading website, advises rookie cache-hiders to contact public land management agencies for regulations or restrictions.

More adventuresome cachers leave containers on cliff sides, on the tops of mountains, in the ocean and at the bottoms of lakes. The “Chelan SCUBA Cache” can be found in the back seat of a 1956 Ford sunk 115 feet deep at the bottom of frigid Lake Chelan in Washington state, in conditions a geocaching.com post warns may cause nitrogen narcosis. Enigmatic clues in the “Tube Torcher Cache” in Hendersonville, North Carolina, direct cachers to climb a narrow steel ladder through pitch-black darkness, to the top of a rodent- and insect-infested corn silo, while the “TMA-1” outside Monterey, California, is a multiple-step hunt for a prize at the top of a 100-foot concrete shaft.

Although extreme geocache missions may require diving or climbing gear, conventional cachers often work just as hard to demonstrate the creativity and cunning necessary to evade outsiders and challenge the experienced. Valnue says local terror “Evil Jim” is notorious for gluing fake moss and twigs to cache containers for camouflage.

However, the expansion of the phenomenon has also created some confusion. In 2003, a farmer in Ellensburg, Washington, called a U.S. Army bomb squad when he unearthed a suspicious tubular container in a roadway tunnel. After three hours of investigation, the squad exposed the contents: birthday-themed toys and knickknacks.

The National Park Service and the Forest Service share the mission of promoting recreational use of public land, but both have taken measures to ensure the activity’s blossoming popularity doesn’t jeopardize natural resources. Although geocaching.com warns users that any cache placed on Park Service land violates federal regulations, Jim Miller, trails manager for the Forest Service recreation program, says the Forest Service does not implement a national policy prohibiting the activity, or require a special land-use permit. “The best caches are those causing no impacts—therefore, no encouragement to travel off designated roads or trails, nothing left behind and no burials,” Miller says.

Dave Holland, Forest Service recreation director, says that most of the agency’s concerns about geocaching will diminish with internal communication, as forest managers get “more direction” on the issue. He says no absolute policy will be adopted, as terrain and use differ vastly from forest to forest.

Managers on individual forests can take precautions to protect their land. The Forest Service can close areas deemed too sensitive for public use, as a flood of cachers to an area can interrupt animal breeding habits, destroy sensitive habitats or expose locations of endangered plants and animals. “Some regions and forests do have more specific policies where such activities have caused—or may cause—impacts on sensitive areas containing endangered species or heritage resources,” Miller says.

Marcia Keener, a program analyst for the Park Service policy office, has seen it all: from online cache coordinates that lead hunters to injure themselves in concealed pitfalls and mineshafts, to cachers uncovering narcotics labs hidden deep in forests, to well-meaning “cache-in, trash-out” participants, who vow to clean litter from parks as they cache, accidentally removing historical artifacts from off-trail archaeological sites.

Keener says the clandestine, anonymous nature of geocaching may be the greatest problem for managers and rangers, whose jobs are to make sure parks meet standards of cleanliness and resource protection. Keener says unmarked cache boxes may be difficult to distinguish from litter, and that tracing them back to their owners is often impossible.

Certain national parks are willing to allow caches in designated areas once the hider has applied for and received a land-use permit; however, Keener says procedures established by Congress for reviewing these applications take time and money. Special permits can cost as much as $100, and may be good for only forty-eight hours.

Miller says that in general, the Forest Service allows many more types of activities—and in a less-controlled atmosphere—than the Park Service, and that the Park Service allows less opportunity to participate in evolving recreation trends and experiences. “The [Forest Service] encourages recreation on [its] lands through participation in existing and new activities that do not cause impacts to natural resources or social conflicts. The benefits of recreation are improved physical condition and mental attitude.”

But Keener says there is room for compromise between cachers and national park managers, and that good communication is essential.

“The [Park Service] would like to remove the Ôban’ language,” she says. “The next step [to allow forms of geocaching] is to get both the natural and cultural resources of national parks on the same page to have a better sense of what will happen if the ban language is removed. The more communication about a proposal and work that can be done to make the activity acceptable, the better. Talking with the park staff is absolutely key.”

Miller agrees. “Geocachers desiring to preserve their abilities to use [Forest Service] land should discuss their ideas with local land managers, as well as establish allowed sites that cause no impact…and encourage responsible use of [Forest Service] lands by others.”

There are alternative forms of geocaching that do not introduce foreign items into forests, including “virtual caches” that use existing landmarks, which cachers must visit and then answer a riddle or question online to validate their find. Keener says virtual caching and similar ideas could allow geocaching to thrive, while simultaneously preserving necessary wilderness and educating people about lesser-known areas of national parks.

Whether or not future restrictions further limit the scope and locations of geocaching, it remains certain that the activity’s marriage of nature and technological advancements will attract new thrill-seekers.

As the hobby spreads, the types of caches become more creative. On a business trip to Ireland, Valnue hid a “travel bug” (a trinket marked with serial numbers and tracked online) that later turned up in Maine. One website documents the migration of hundreds of plastic monkeys as they travel the globe from cache box to cache box. Hide-and-seek book clubs allow readers to swap literature through caches.

Valnue bubbles with child-like enthusiasm as he drives his black sports utility vehicle adorned with a large geocaching sticker on the back window. “It’s not about prizes,” he explains. “I hide the stuff I find cleaning out my house and garage.” He constantly points out specific landmarks—road signs, fallen trees, boulders—along the way that mark caches he has already found.

Every weekend, his obsession leads him to more unvisited locations. “It’s a crazy underworld,” he says. “I’m constantly finding new places to go. Within a ten-mile radius, there are about 250 caches.”

Valnue’s latest hunt—for the “Turtle Pond” cache—begins near a sewage treatment plant in a public park. On the hunt, he runs into a retired couple known online as “GlenMart.” Though they communicate frequently through the Internet, he has met the couple only a few times on the trail.

But as “Mart,” a short woman in a sweatshirt and a neon-pink baseball cap, hops out of her car, the bond formed online becomes immediately apparent. She laughs and promises to be the first to find the latest cache that Valnue has hidden. Meanwhile, the three combine forces and agree to seek “Turtle Pond” together.

Edging past the treatment plant and into the forest, the trio compares recent expeditions. GPS units are pulled out and maps are consulted as the chatter settles on the current cache. Just beyond the reeking sewage tanks, wooded trails lead to a pristine park and a small pond. Valnue leads the way down the trail, pointing in excitement, as if the treasure hunt at hand were his very first.”

“Yeah, I have a few GPS finds under my belt. I have seen a few people who live near the Phoenix preserves park treat the park as if it belongs to them and repeatedly remove caches. so much for public lands :( I like all of the different kinds of caches too. Educating people to respect property can be difficult because in every group of people there are always a few bad apples-
It is an addicting fun sport! And it gets you to go to new places! I can't wait to place a cache 15 miles in from the trailhead and have someone else find it!”