This sounds like it might be a fun hobby for my family. But I know very little about it.
What exactly does geocaching involve? Any helpful tips for how to get started?
If anyone would care to share their experiences that would be great!
Geocaching.com is a great place to start.
We enjoy it. I use the geocaching app on my iPhone. Basically, you get coordinates from the website of locations of caches people have placed. Using a GPS to locate, you can log the ones you find. “Geeks using multimillion dollar technology to find Tupperware in the woods”!
We try to make this a part of family vacations. We’ve done historical ones, silly ones, hard, easy all kinds.
ETA: we,re not retired, homeschoolers or trailblazers. Just usual family that likes easy hikes with a goal in mind. 
We have a letterbox cache in my library, and there are several letterboxes and geocaches around the neighboring counties.
It seems to be the sort of thing that works best if:
- you have a dedicated geocaching/letterboxing community where you live or nearby enough that you can get to a lot of caches and have other people come to caches that you put out yourself
OR
- you travel a lot, and would therefore be able to search out and find caches while you travel.
If you don’t have either of the above, it seems like it would be a fairly short-lived hobby, as there isn’t much point to making caches that no-one else hits up, or possibility for finding other people’s caches.
The wikipedia articles are actually fairly useful and interesting:
Where I live, it seems to be a hobby that’s restricted to retirees, homeschooling families, and really intense hikers/trailblazers/mountainclimbers.
I’ve been an avid geocacher for years. SWMBO and I go caching when we do tournaments, thereby managing to combine our passions for GC and Taekwondo.
The two best sites are geocaching.com and terracaching.com. TC requires sponsorship; if you join, send me a PM and I’ll be very happy to be one of your sponsors.
Be prepared to get dirty, sweaty, bumped, bruised…and have the time of your life!!
Its like a treasure hunt, except there is no treasure, and no hunting. You are pretty much told exactly where to find the “non-treasure”.
There are literally hundreds of caches within a short drive from my house. And they are nearly all on the top of some insignificant hill, under a pile of rocks. A box of cheap Mardi-gras beads, dust, dead spiders and a broken pencil. Wow.
I did it three or four times with my kid. You could actually see the two other “sites” from the third one! I found the whole thing very lame, unimaginative and pointless. So did my kid. I have a bunch of sites programed in the GPS, and by driving down the dirt road you can determine, “Well, there is one on the top of *that *hill, and one on the top of that hill, and one in the lake you can only get to when the level drops”.
But they are a good source for free ammo boxes. 
It’s a little lame, but also a little fun.
Once you’ve huffed your way to the top of a hill, it’s nice to sit, relax, sip at your water bottle (or curse yourself for forgetting your water bottle!) and read a few of the fun notes people have left behind. Then write a few fun notes yourself.
It’s little more than a “Killroy Was Here” moment, although a hell of a lot nicer than using spray-paint on the rocks.
See ya atop Mt. Cuyamaca, belike!
We enjoy it. I use it as an excuse to take long walks in parks in the city that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone to, and it distracts my son from taking yet another boring (to him) walk when he could be playing video games.
I also like planning routes for when we do trips. Caches are a good way to explore new surroundings and stretch the legs on a long driving trip. Last fall we went to Jasper and hit a few Earth and Ghost Caches along the way. They were basically turnouts that we’d otherwise drive on past and miss some interesting things. One spot I had never stopped at before because it’s a straightaway and perfect to just zip along but there is this neat looking weeping wall when you stop and look around…
I can’t wait to hit up ones on our trip this summer. 
Since I like to travel, hike and generally explore I’ve been geo-curious for a while.
I get the feeling that it started with more involved strenuous adventures to obscure places and has grown into lameness.
I suppose you can make of it what you want… is there a good method to filter out the lameness in order to focus on what you want?
Don’t do it myself but introduced my dad to the concept and went out with him a couple of times and I vote pretty lame.
Having said that, when it first started, GPS wasn’t so common, and at least negotiating one’s way using Ordnance Survey maps was a challenge. With an iPhone it’s kinda simple.
It’s a great way to discover all of the hidden greenspaces in your area. It’s some good exercise too. I don’t know what is up with the cachers in Gatopescado’s area but most places offer some more imaginative and creative caches to go along with the more mundane. Some caches are puzzle caches where you have to solve the puzzle to get the correct coords. Others are meant to do at night. Some are multiples where you find the first and that leads you to the next and so on. Many have to do with history and geology. There is a new category of caches called ‘Whereigo’ caches that use a smartphone to guide you on a coordinate based adventure. Think videogame in real time/space.
I also dispute the fact that just having an iPhone makes it easy. Many many caches these days are cleverly hidden and are either very small or use inventively camouflaged urban containers.
In the end, what you get out of caching is what you put into it. Caches are rated as to Difficulty/Terrain and you can choose to do only the more difficult ones. You track your own progress on the website and it is up to you how challenging you want to make it for yourself.
Grab your phone, create and account on geocaching.com, and go outside and try it. Not everyone sees the point but it is what you make of it.
ETA, there is a social aspect to it as well. Area cachers often meetup at ‘Event’ caches and sometimes get together to do a “Cache In, Trash out” workday to help maintain local green spaces.
My kids liked it more when they were younger. Now at 18 and 14, the shine has worn off!
Still, they like knowing that there’s a mini-cache in the bushes in the planter right in front of Barnes & Noble that passers by will never learn about, or that there’s one in the base of that light post at the library. All kids love secrets, and this just lets them in on a bunch.
That said, I had one cache placed within a half-mile of a high school, well hidden behind a building and camoflaged in a cinder brick wall. It disappeared 3 times before I stopped re-doing it. Free ammo cans, indeed.:mad:
One cache near my home is in an office park. Boring, right? Once you find it, you find that it’s in an ancient cemetary holding Civil War era graves. No one would ever know that it exists unless someone put a cache there to show others. Kinda cool, I think.
Nearby Stone Mountain Parkhas dozens, and any climbing and hiking my fat ass does is worth something.
It’s not about the broken pencils and Hot Wheels cars. It’s about exploring, hiking, excersize, and spending some time with a friend or family member.
That’s never a bad thing, right?
I’m partial to Garmin products. All of mine have worked well for years.
The newest crop of GPSRsmakes geocaching paperless and easy. When you find stuff, you’re in a better mood then when you don’t!
Take a look at http://www.geocaching.com/. You can enter your zip code and will probably see several hundred caches near you. Pick a few easy ones and go give it a try; that’s the only way to know if you’re gonna like it.
You can filter the search for distance, for difficulty and for types of caches. I’ve found some really interesting spots that I wasn’t aware of, but then too, some of them were totally aimed at 8 year old kids. You learn with experience to pass on the ones you’re not likely to like.
A few years ago I placed a cache in a swamp near my house that we used to play in when we were kids. The info got posted on the website at about 10 PM. By midnight somebody who lived 15 miles away had found it … in the rain, in the swamp, in the dark. He is a much more dedicated cacher than I am.
You get out of it what you put into it. It’s a good way to find out about out of the way parks and reservations that you’d otherwise never have found out about.
The caches are graded in terms of difficulty and terrain, so you don’t have to stick with the easy “hop out of the car and grab it” type of caches. And it’s good motivation to go for a hike.
And if you don’t like what’s in the caches, you can always step up and put some nicer things in them.
Exactly! I don’t go all the time. A couple times a month, pack a lunch and some water and go wander a new area (or a new area of a familiar spot, it’s taken me down some paths I don’t usually walk). If you don’t like urban ones look up other areas. Read the comments, they’ll warn of things like scrambling through brambles. Pick places you’d like to go anyway and see what’s on the way there. That’s how I’ve been working it and it works nicely for us.
My problem is I’m an avid off-roader and dirt-bike rider and live in the middle of nowhere. It seems that 90% of the sites are in less interesting places I go to on a near daily basis, and then there is nothing to see once you get there. Of the 4 sites my kid and I went to, I was able to drive the Jeep right up to 3 of them. All were about 100-300 yards off a dirt road up some stupid hill. Same story with the dozens of sites I programed into the GPS. I can tell its just a box on the top of another hill, just like the last one. I actually decided to make my own that would be a challange, but then lost all interest.
Of the three* very *near my house (I live on the Pony Express/California Trail), I often see cars parked (right where the Geocache site say to park!) and people walking up the hill. I alway think to myself, “Get ready for disappointment”.
But this is just my experience. I can see how it could be interestiing in other areas or for people visiting/new to the area. If you have a GPS, give it a try.
Of course, I was completely* underwhelmed *by Mt. Rushmore, so there you have it! 
I just had my very first geocaching experience a couple days ago. It was a first/blind date – we just met (with my dog) at a nearby park. My date had the app and knew where all the caches were, so he just let me do the hunting and would only give me hints if I was going far away in the wrong direction. “Ummm… you’re getting colder.”
The caches weren’t anything interesting, but it was fun. If you like puzzles and problem-solving along with creative thinking. I thought it was the perfect thing for that sort of situation, where we were just meeting for the first time and needed something to do, rather than just sit there trying to make conversation. Between the dog and the geocache adventure, we learned a lot about each other in a very short time.
So I’m all for it and will probably do it again. I may even download an app for my phone and start up with my other friends. I have some I think might really enjoy it. And I have a lot of kitchy trinkets I now know what to do with.
My SO is into geocaching. I am lukewarm about looking up the caches and logging that you’ve found them, I let her handle all that. I also don’t like caches in parking lots, it makes me uncomfortable messing around with light poles and stuff out in public.
However it’s well worth going after caches in parks and natural areas. You will be led to some really neat spots that you would probably never find otherwise. Off then beaten path, literally.
Also geocachers are a quirky but almost unfailingly nice group of people.
All you pretty much need is a GPS (ideally not a car navigation thing, but a full-featured off-road GPS.)
Clearly the geocachers in your neck of the land lack imagination, among other things. My wife and I do it regularly as a way to get out, exercise a bit and enjoy the land a fresh air.
We have a local nature park where one geocacher made it a real event. They have something like a dozen different waypoints along the route. You have to find each waypoint, and information from that waypoint takes you to the next waypoint. For example, the “trail” begins at the park entrance near the park sign. You have to read the sign to find clues to enter into your GPS in order to take you to the next waypoint. One waypoint has you standing under a large tree with many trunks. You have to count the number of visible trunks, then subtract the number of visible trunks that have been stumped, in order to enter the details into your GPS to take you to the next waypoint. And so on.
On another geocaching adventure, a geocacher instructs everyone to pack a lunch and start in the morning. The “trail” takes you to a number of waypoints until you finally get to cache site. Once there, the cache instructs you to turn around, sit down and have lunch. What you realize at that point is the geocacher has taken you on a journey to a wonderful viewpoint. You don’t realize it at all until you’re told to look because you’re concentrating to hard on using the GPS to move from waypoint to waypoint.
BTW, you need a real GPS. Those car navigation GPS units just don’t work when on a “real” geocaching adventure.
I’ve been an avid geocacher for the last couple of years.
I really enjoy this as a hobby. My wife and 6 year old daughter enjoy doing it as well.
Me and a couple of co-workers have gone on a caching weekend, where we go to a new area and spend a couple of days caching. We found 180 in one weekend it was pretty cool.
I have hidden 3 caches, I always enjoy seeing how often they’re found and who found them.
Finding trackables is very cool as well. Trackables are small items that are registered at geocaching.com that get passed from cache to cache. I am in possession of one trackable that has traveled 50,000 miles since 2006!
I have released a trackable that I am hoping will get to Fenway Park to see a Red Sox game. Trackables are a modern version of a message in a bottle dropped at sea. You never know where it will end up!
I also prefer caching in the woods rather than urban caching. With urban caching you have to keep an eye out for non-cachers (“Muggles”, yeah that name doesn’t sound too lame :rolleyes:).
I have seen some really clever hides, some favorites:
- Fake bolts, that are hollow inside
- Birdhouses with false bottoms
- Fake sprinkler heads
- Trees with fake hollow branches
One thing I like collecting are called “souvenirs”. Every Time you find a cache in a new Province or State you get a new souvenir (it’s just a icon on your geocaching profile page). I was down in Dallas Texas in January for some training. I had a spare day so I drove north east to Oklahoma grabbed a cache (1 souvenir), then south east to Texarkana Arkansas (2nd souvenir), the south into Louisiana (3rd souvenir) then back to Texas to grab a cache (4th souvenir!).
To summarize, it’s a fun hobby. It gets me and my family out hiking and exploring when we never would have done anything like it before. I always take my GPS when I travel, looking for caches on trips is a great way to see things you would never usually see.
I say go for it!
MtM (Geocaching Account “the.mcdonalds”)
We just picked up a GPS as well. This is something that has fascinated me for about two years now; it seems like a great way to get some exercise. There’s one around the corner from my work that I will be checking out on Monday lunch.