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A personal account of the emerging geocaching sport

by Joe Tarr

By all rights, Casey’s Playground should be within 10 to 30 feet of where we are, but Ranae and I can’t find the damn thing. Southpaw wrote that he hid it at N 35� 55.589; W 083� 57.753 in March and our GPS says we’re right around those coordinates, but we don’t see it anywhere.

A long, thick berm of rocks stretches from Cherokee Boulevard down to the Tennessee River and we figure what we’re searching for has got to be around it somewhere. We creep down underneath the bushes and trees that line the river, look up in trees, uncover rocks, even peer into the water, but it’s nowhere.

We’re supposed to be using stealth in our hunt, but it seems a little silly. A man and two women with dogs walk by, lingering as they eye us with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. They look like they’re about to ask us what we’re doing, but they finally move along.

Part of the problem is that our GPS keeps pointing us in different directions. Another part of the problem is we forgot to bring the clue, which would have told us “notintherockberm,” and helped refine our search. Also, we’re novices in this hide-‘n’-seek subculture.

“One of my favorite Buddhist sayings is ‘If you seek it, you lose it,’” Ranae says. We soon abandon our search.

For normal people, N 35� 55.589; W 083� 57.753 is located somewhere close to the river in Sequoyah Hills Park. What we’re looking for is called a “Geocache.” I think Casey is a dog, but I’m not certain.

When we mention “geocaching” to most people, they just stare at us blankly. But to a small, obsessive bunch of geeks and nerds, it’s one of the coolest things in the world.

The simple explanation is that people hide things, post the GPS coordinates on a website—www.geocaching.com—then a bunch of other people look for it. There are, however, many variations on the theme.

When you log onto geocaching.com, it’s impressive how many caches are out there. Chances are there’s one in your neighborhood. GPS—or, global positioning system—uses satellites to pinpoint your location, and it can also direct you to specific coordinates you plug into it.

The geocaching hobby took off after May 1, 2000, when the United States stopped degrading the GPS signals available the public, which meant people could get much more accurate signals, sometimes with a margin of error of only a few feet. (Before that, accurate readings were available only to military or approved personnel.)

The first cache was hidden just two days later and since then, the sport has boomed, even if it’s only among a tiny subculture of techno, map, puzzle and outdoor fanatics. Today, there are almost 100,000 active geocaches.

I first heard about geocaching from Ranae Kowalczuk and BJ Brock. They learned about it through their studies and work as geologists, which often require the use of GPS.

Many caches contain little prizes—trinkets, hats, first aid kits, coins, mixed CDs, rocks, gift cards—that are free to take, as long as you leave something in exchange. Earlier in the afternoon, Ranae and I hit Bert’s Key Chain Collection. If we’d brought a keychain to leave, we could have swapped for one of the many cool ones stashed in an ammo box.

A friend of Ranae’s sent her a rock he found in a cache somewhere in New England. It’s the kind of thing that only a geologist would immediately dig or understand the importance of. It’s a pelagic sediment, or “we can call it a rock,” she says. It was taken in a dive, probably off the coast of China, down about 6,400 feet.

Several caches have disposable cameras for its discoverers to take snapshots of themselves. Most of them contain a logbook , in which people write notes, signing their geocaching monikers: Mountain Mudbug, Team Bert, the Mighty Penguins, ego, Coonass, Kick the Frog (Ranae and I are using Dr. Radical and Mute Boy, respectively—hey, I said we’re a bunch of dorks). Several use personalized stamps in the logbooks.

There are other types of caches. There are microcaches, which could be a small magnet with “geocaching.com” written on it, or a small tin with a logbook. In the geocaching geekdom, there are people who campaign against the microcache, finding it a perversion of the original game, because there’s nothing to trade. There are virtual caches, mystery or puzzle caches, nestling caches that you can locate only by first finding the “nest.” There are hitchhiking caches that move from cache to cache. Go to monkeycache.com, and you can track several plastic hanging monkeys that have been unleashed in the geocaching world.

Even though you theoretically have the precise coordinates for each cache location, finding them is not as easy as it sounds. The margin of error in readings can be several feet off, and most of them are well hidden.

Our first attempt at finding one—a microcache on the newly renovated Gay Street Bridge—we miss, because we’re accidentally using the wrong units. The second one, Bart’s Keychain Cache, we end up circling around a few times before finally stumbling across it, piled underneath some wood.

Human error is, of course, a good possibility. Searching for one cache, we accidentally leave off a zero at the beginning of the coordinates. “It says it’s 1,286 miles away,” Ranae says. She’s the science whiz and can figure this stuff out a lot quicker than I, so I leave most of the navigation in her hands. I’m not sure I could find any of these on my own.

Hunting for caches is only half the fun. Once you find a few, you start scheming about where to hide your own and what to put in it. Ranae and BJ hid a cache on an island in Norris Lake, filled it with fossils and matchbooks from bars around town. “A lot of them you can walk to pretty easily,” she says. “We wanted one with a little more adventure to get to. You pretty much need a kayak to get to it.”

With ours, we wanted to have something unique to hide. Ranae’s idea was for a “One-Term President” cache, where we’d leave patches and stickers of the commander-in-chief with that saying written underneath. But the moderators at geocaching.com wrote, “the guidelines explicitly prohibit the placing of caches with an agenda.”

We think about a cache of pamphlets—ones on STDs, recycling, pollution, etc. But finally settle on a book cache. The idea is bring a paperback and you can trade it out for another.

With a wad of trade credit, we head to McKay’s, trying to make the list as diverse as possible: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Importance of Being Earnest, Leaves of Grass, A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf, Aesop’s Fables, Nancy Drew Ghost Stories, Dialogues of Plato, Official Rules of Card Games, Dhammapada, and the Audubon Field Guide to Familiar Reptiles and Amphibians. Alas, we don’t score any Agee or McCarthy today.

Then it’s off to the Greene Military out on Kingston Pike, next to the Rainbow Room for an ammo box. Pasted to the door is a bumpersticker that reads “You’re Either With Us or With The Terrorists.” Somehow, it feels like we’re doing something much more illicit than hiding books.

We thought about stashing them down in Gene Harrogate’s old cave underneath the Hill Avenue viaduct. But we worry homeless people might trash the cache. Also, GPS doesn’t work too hot underneath a bridge. Plus it involves sneaking past a rather grumpy looking security guard.

Finally, we settle on the greenway near 11th Street, which connects Cumberland Avenue to Neyland Drive. Many of the instructions advise geocachers to use “stealth” in their search. “Especially with Terror America, if you’re looking shady and picking up a small container, you might attract the wrong kind of interest,” Ranae says.

We hide the ammo box in Ranae’s backpack and try to act casual as we keep an eye out for a good hiding spot. We stumble onto a homeless camp and retreat. Eventually, we find a decent spot underneath an old railroad bridge, which was converted into a pedestrian walkway.

Ranae has bad case of arachnophobia—the result of a nasty, but fortunately temporary, case of gangrene caused by a brown recluse bite—so it’s a little creepy in the shadows of this bridge. We quickly stash it, mark our coordinates, and hurry away.

It was a great spot. Unfortunately, the geocaching monitors reject it, in their ever-precise geocache terms, because it is too close to another cache (214 feet) and too close to railroad tracks (102 feet).

The next day, I carefully elude a bikecop and a UT patrol car, as I retrieve the cache, wondering all the while how the hell I would explain the ammo box I just happened to “find” on university property.

Our second hiding spot, this one in North Knoxville, isn’t as cool. It’s in the First Creek Greenway and we had to use even more stealth hiding it, because there were a lot more people around and kids on nearby porches gawk at us as we look for a spot. This time it was accepted. It’s located at N 35� 59.226 W 083� 55.001, should you care to look.

I have a feeling that most of you reading this story couldn’t care less about the cache hidden by Dr. Radical and Mute Boy, and that’s fine. But I also know that someone out there can’t wait to look for it. Whoever you are, bring a good book to trade.

May 20, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 21 © 2004 Metro Pulse