Geocaching 101

Geocaching takes you to some cool places!
"Ancient" cave paintings (c.1970's) at Monte Sano State Park

I am surprised to still encounter people who enjoy hiking but don’t know about geocaching. Sure, they have heard the word, but they don’t know exactly what it entails. When we started doing it (a dozen years ago) we had to have a special hand-held GPS device that wasn’t very useful for anything else, and yet geocaching was getting very popular even then. Now, almost everybody’s got GPS built into their phones so there is no special equipment needed. Ten years ago I wrote an article about geocaching for an unschooling magazine (Live Free Learn Free). Not much has changed since then except that you can use your phone’s GPS and there are even more geocaches all over the world! 

A typical ammo box cache

One of my favorite series of caches is the Jolly Green series, right here in Huntsville. Even with their unusual size I only found one of them myself. I enjoy the hiking, but I am no good at finding the actual caches (which usually involves looking under rocks, in trees, etc.). I leave that up to the kids!

Jolly Green's straw

Jolly Green's car key

It is also fun to set your own Travel Bugs on their way and track them online. Our family’s most-traveled bug has covered 21,755 miles. You can specify a destination or just “general travel.” Apparently, a lot of people are confused about the Arctic vs. the Antarctic. We have a bug with a desired destination of the Antarctic that is continually being derailed by being sent north (including Alaska).  The furthest south it has gone is Honduras, but it has spent most of its time in the U.S. and is currently in Florida. Our bug that has visited the most countries has logged 18,486 miles and is currently making its way around Germany. 

You can track your Travel Bug on your Geocaching.com account. (This is a closeup on part of our Butterfly Travel Bug's map.)

Don’t get too attached to one bug in particular because they do tend to go missing sometimes (although we had one reappear a year later when a Canadian couple realized it was still in their luggage after they had picked it up in the Turks and Caicos Islands on a previous trip). Go to Geocaching.com for more info or to get started geocaching - it's free!

Getting one of our Travel Bugs, the gold car, started by placing it in a cache in Alabama