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An Insight Into Geocaching

December 25th, 2008

An Insight Into Geocaching

Geocaching probably gets its idea from letter boxing. In letter boxing clues and references to landmarks were embedded in stories. In geocaching a geocacher puts a log book with pen or pencil and a trinket or treasure in the cache.

On the Internet there are many web sites promoting the sport. The web sites contain such things as cache of the month, tips on hiding a cache, events, photo albums, members and where they are from as well as the posted coordinates for caches.

To obtain the data the geocacher can upload data, also called way points, from different web sites in various formats, usually as a GPX file. GPX files use XML. There is plenty of geocaching software available for the avid geocacher to filter search and cache types that are based on certain criteria.

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that uses a GPS receiver to find treasures that have been hidden in places around the world. It is a treasure hunting game. The geocache is a small waterproof container that holds a treasure of some nature that someone has placed in it, and a log book. The treasure is usually a small toy with little worth, or a little trinket, maybe a coin. The treasure could also be an item for trading as you find the caches. Geocachers are allowed to take an item from the caches and leave something of equal value in its place.

Geocaching is available on all seven continents including antarctica. There are 800,000 plus geocaches registered on web sites across the web. The cache’s coordinates are noted by means of their GPS receiver and then posted on a web site. Other geocachers choose to be the hunter and view the coordinates on the geocaching web site that have been posted by various geocachers. They then proceed to look for the geocache by using their handheld GPS receivers. When they find the cache they record the adventure in the log book in the geocache and also online at the geocaching web site.

The geocaches come in many sizes. Some are harder to locate than others for reasons such as location or visibility. An easy to find cache could be called a drive-by, a park ‘n’ grab (PNGs), or cache and dash. The cache hunt can be made more difficult as well. The hunt might include long searches or traveling a long distance. A geocacher may stage multi-caches, underwater caches, so many feet up a tree, on a mountain peak or even above the Arctic Circle.

A traditional cache hunt includes a log book, and is always found exactly at the coordinates recorded on the geocachers web site where the geocacher got the coordinates from. An event for caching has geocaches placed at the event’s location only for the duration of the event. The letterbox hybrid variation of geocaching includes a geocache and a letterbox in the container. The letterbox holds a rubber stamp and a logbook. A letter boxer has their own stamp with them, they use this to stamp the logbook in the cache they find and then take the stamp from that cache’s letterbox and stamp their personal log book with that. A multi-cache uses multiple discoveries of intermediate points that each contain the coordinates for the next stage, there can be one or more intermediate points, at the end the cache contains the log book and the treasure. Geocaching is also done by use of web cams.

Geocaching is certain to be a fun sport to try if you haven’t done so already.

To watch a film on Geocaching, visit the wonderful VideoJug website – and learn more about it all.

An Insight Into Geocaching / Author: jdobson

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