The Growing Sport Turns A Walk in the Park Into a
Treasure Hunt
Do you see it? Are
we close?”
My children looked
feverishly around as my husband held out the GPS app on his phone while
stepping over branches and tree stumps. The leaves crunched under our feet as
we walked through the St. Columban Retreat Center’s grounds to find a hidden
treasure.
No, we weren’t seeking
lost gold or looking for my keys.
We were geocaching, an
activity in which participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates
and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.
The sport has grown
quickly along with the technology—the increasingly affordable technology—that
has made it possible. According to Geocaching.com, the most-popular website
dedicated to the activity, there are 2,584,841 active geocaches and more than
six million geocachers throughout the world.
Gone are the analog days
in which you had to navigate your way with compass and maps. Now, with apps
specifically for geocaching and GPS management, families can pick the level of
difficulty and type of terrain they want to explore.
For our first adventure,
we picked tasks that rated a measly 1.5 on the 10.0 scale. We thought finding
the canisters would be a breeze. And two out of the four times, it was. But
even after 20 minutes of searching, we found that we struggled to find the
others. We followed the directions, even read the clues included, but quickly
realized that some things take a bit more time and experience.
We are hooked. We
already have a plan to go back out to the caches we missed and are determined
to find them on our next day off.
And we aren’t alone.
Omaha has its own group
dedicated to geocaching in Nebraska. Nebraskache has more than 500 members of
all ages throughout the state. Their Yahoo and Facebook groups are
members-only, though all are welcome to join. They post their favorite caches,
organize group outings, and even share clues and tips to finding the
“treasure.”
Brady Holmes, 37, an
experienced cacher who works as a change-control technician for Dell in
Lincoln, started caching in 2011. “For me, it was a way to start exercising. I
cached every other weekend and then I became extremely addicted and ended up
caching every day for over 450 days. My first year I found over 2,000
caches.”
Although that number is
on the high end, many people are hooked right from the start.
Kia Itsen, 38, an
insurance industry staffer, says it’s an adventure her whole family has loved
since they first started in 2014. Her 10-year-old daughter is now finding the
caches herself and loving every minute of it. It’s not the amount of finds that
attracts her but rather where the journey takes them. “There are many caches in
Nebraska and geocaching takes me to so many places I would have never gone to
otherwise.”
The activity has gotten
so popular in Nebraska that the state recently won the bid for the 2015
Geocoinfest, which will be held at Strategic Air and Space Museum in Ashland on
Oct. 3. This traveling event will offer sessions on geocaching while also having
an expo for products and supplies, as well as a kids’ area to introduce
children to the activity.
So whether you go as a
family, with friends, or out on your own, geocaching is giving people an
opportunity to experience new places while challenging them and leaving them
wanting more.
