Geocaching Addiction

“I'm almost to 50 and the last few I've done have been pretty difficult. The best one so far I did was in WV last weekend...it looked like a 2 mile hike in and out over a mountain...turned out to be a 9 mile dayhike over difficult terrain with a huge waterfall at the end. We had several caches planned before heading home but this one took so much time it ended up being the only one we got to do.”

“I still don't get it - what is the goal? Game of hide and seek? BTW I know you use a GPS for this, just not comprehending...”

“I do it for the hunt. Geocaching can show you things in your own area that you didn't know existed. I drove the same route to work for 3 years and didn't know there was a big hidden waterfall 100 yards off the road until a Geocache took me there. Plus it's an excuse to get outside and hike somewhere new.”

“A geocache is an object placed somewhere. Some are indoors, some are in the wilderness some are in urban areas. The GPS co-ordinates are placed on line and people choose to find the object. That's the basic idea. It can get more involved than that I guess. I don't have a GPS so I haven't really gotten into it.”

“I started a couple of summers ago. I'm up to 180 finds now. I think I have 4 caches that I've hidden still active and one travel bug out that I started. I've slowed down on the hunt and usually try to focus on the ones that are on the trails.”

“I've never seen an indoor cache...most are in urban areas, good ones are in the wilderness.

I'm up to 52 as of tonight, found 6 bugs. Haven't placed a cache or set loose any travel bugs yet, but I plan on ordering a few soon to drop off when I'm out of state. This year I'll be in CT, WV, PA, IN, Montana, GA, KY, FL, TN, and probably a few more.

There are almost 700 caches in Columbus, but most of them are crappy micro caches. I just became a member so I can filter those out and go for the bigger ones that aren't in the parking lot of Krogers.”

“Seems to me I have heard about some placed in public buildings. I could be wrong.”

“I guess they could be, but how would you get a GPS signal once inside?”

“I'm up to 81 and just got one of the new jeep TBs to launch. It's fun, and usually there is a cache where I am already going anyway.”

“Dub.... I must be thinking of some other search and find system... but I can't remember what I am thinking of. :?)”

“I started geocaching five years ago. I stopped geocaching about three years ago. I found a lot of interesting places that I never would have known about. Some of them I have driven past my whole life.

Then came the masses who thought a Wal-Mart parking lot was a cool location. Micro-caches turned the hobby literally into hide and seek. People thought it was fun to conceal a small item in an empty lot in the middle of town.

The urban cachers could not operate the GPS well enough to get an accurate set of coordinates to post. They wanted to socialize and have parties. They now have parties where members walk around with caches in their pockets and you ask people for their cache. It became a numbers game.

I will go out for a cache every now and then if one is near my hike. I sign the cache, but don't bother to log the finds anymore.”

“if the cache were IN a building you would probably have to locate it the hard way...compass and map.”

“Yeah bacpac, I know what you mean. I started in 03 and quit until about a month ago and I've seen the trend move from caches being in cool locations and metro parks to behind the McDonalds. One I found the other day said something along the lines of, "Columbus needs more easy park and grab caches, hopefully a few we set like this will start a trend."

I became a premium member so you can select the cache size in your search. When I went to WV last weekend I filtered out micros, webcam caches, etc.

One big thing I noticed was how difficulty ratings varied from a metropolitan area to a wilderness area. In Columbus a cache will get a difficulty of 3 and a terrain of 3 if you have to walk more than 1/4 mile from your car. So I searched for some 2/2 caches in WV to get long the road...most of them took 45mins to an hour in WV and some of them were significant hikes through deep brush. We were really shocked that every cache we tried in WV was difficult as we weren't really used to that in Columbus. I have enjoyed the WV caches most.”