Geocaching: A Fun Family Outdoor Adventure

These days its getting harder and harder for a parent to find family-friendly activities that will keep their kids engaged long enough to forge any kind of meaningful relationship with them. Though we'd like to, we can't go fishing or hunting everyday. Besides, kids need a wide, diverse range of endeavors to round out their skillsets. Still, it's so hard to drag their attention away from video games and smart phones. So if you and your kids love gadgets, then you might want to try Geocaching, a GPS adventure game that's sweeping the world.

In The Beginning

On May 3, 2000, after GPS in essence took off its training wheels and was upgraded to give users the ability to pinpoint small objects, Dave Ulmer of Beaver Creek, OR decided to play a little scavenger hunt game. He stuffed some software, videos, books, food, money and a slingshot into a black plastic bucket, hid it partially in the ground and then posted the coordinates onto a Usenet newsgroup with the challenge for someone to "discover" it. Within three days, the first adventurer had found the bucket and Geocaching was born.

Today that first location has been memorialized with the "Original Stash Tribute Plaque" that now sits at the actual site.

Sweeping The World

That one little black bucket buried halfway in the Oregon soil sparked a worldwide phenomenon. Today, there are 1,244,597 active geocaches spread all over the globe. Geocachers can find them in 180 countries, on mountain peaks, in treetops, underwater, even in Antarctica.

Adventure seekers with GPS devices can search a number of websites for the latitude and longitude of a geocache then set out to locate it, knowing full well that it can be cleverly hidden. Once they locate it (usually a waterproof case), they sign the logbook, exchange some of the hidden "treasure" with something they brought along for trade, then they put the case back to its original spot, concealing it just as it was found. Once back home, the Geocahers can share their adventure stories online.

Something For Everyone

With so many geocaches in so many different countries all in varying degrees of difficulty, Geocaching has something for every skill level. Some searches are easy and involve only a few square miles, others can be quite challenging, cover some tough terrain and cover hundreds of thousands of miles. All kinds of variations have sprung up, too, including multi-cache, night cache, moving cache, mystery cache and virtual cache. A neat aspect of Geocache is how it can be used as an educational tool, like the Geological Society of America and their Earthcache.

A Word To The Wise

Geocaching can be a blast, but it's not without its dangers. Aside from the usual cuts and bruises one can get from negotiating rough terrain, the sport has also gotten some unwanted attention from law enforcement. In this age of suspicious packages and enhanced security searches, it's no wonder that some strange hidden case might raise more than a few eyebrows. In fact, Geocache have actually caused the evacuation of schools and have been blown up by bomb squads.

With that in mind, it's a good idea to make sure you're not tresspassing, not too close to a school and are not acting too strangely (though, let's face it, you gotta be a little strange to be Geocaching in the first place).

When done safely, Geocaching can be an exciting, educational adventure for the whole family. You get to explore the great outdoors, play with gadgets and learn something new along the way. What can be better?

sources: geocaching.com, wikipedia.org photo: news.proust-sailing.com

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