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Can you find one?

Geocaching is a worldwide game; all it takes is a GPS (Global Positioning System). You travel around and find caches (containers hidden by other people with cool stuff inside). You could think of it as the world’s largest scavenger hunt. You get coordinates off of geocaching.com, load them on to your GPS and you are set and ready to go. There are different levels of difficulty depending on how hard they are to find and how hard it is to get to the location where it is hidden.

I have recently taken up this hobby and so far it is a blast. There are 241 caches hidden within 10 miles of Helena. So far I have found about thirty of them and I have only been doing this for a month. Some that I have tried to find have been hidden so well that I could not find them.

For example, at the golf course next to Carroll I was led to a putting green by my GPS coordinates. Now this is where the cache was said to have been hidden. So I looked around for a good twenty minutes, right when I was about to leave I noticed a golf ball in a small shrub. I go golfing occasionally so I thought a free golf ball would be a nice addition to my golf bag. When I picked it up I realized that it had a problem, it looked as if it had been cut in half and then glued together. After a brief examination I realized that it had been rigged to unscrew. I unscrewed it and found a piece of paper and a small pencil. It hit me at that point that this was the cache that I had just spent twenty minutes looking for. I signed the paper and put it back where I found it. I thought this was pretty cool because it was very well disguised and it really let me know how creative people could be, and how close to home this game was.

My latest adventure took me to Mt. Helena. It was called a Sudoku cache and it took me on a ten mile hike. I found the first cache in about thirty minutes almost toward the summit. When I looked in the hidden container I found a Sudoku puzzle and some directions. I had to solve the Sudoku puzzle in order to get the coordinates for the next cache, but each puzzle would get progressively harder. By the time I made it to the fourth and final cache I had walked ten miles and for 5 hours all over Mt. Helena solving Sudoku puzzles and moving from cache to cache.

The last cache on Mt. Helena that belonged to the Sudoku sequence was a large ammo canister filled with trade items (things that could be taken or left by the finders) and a camera. You were supposed to take a picture of yourself, sign the log book, and take a trade item. I took what is called a travel bug. This is an item that you are suppose to take and put in a different cache then log its position online.

I finally returned back to Carroll exhausted and successful. I looked up the travel bug online and was amazed to find that it had traveled 27,000 miles and had originated in Germany. This really opened my eyes to just how wide spread this game is. There is even a hidden cache somewhere on the Carroll campus, I bet most students walk within ten feet of it every day and don’t even know it is there. Can you find it?

-Kessler-

kguthrie -is-at- carroll -dot- edu

Check it out at www.geocaching.com