Chris Betcher

I've been in a few conference presentations lately where the topic of geocaching has come up.  Usually, the presenter asks the question "who knows about geocaching?" and about three hands go up.  The presenter then tries to give a quick explanation about it for those who haven't heard about it - "it's like a treasure hunt", or "it's a game where people hide things for others to find", or other similar explanations.  While these summaries are mostly accurate, they don't really give enough information and many people seem interested to know more about it. Thanks to a long involvement with 4WDing, I've been playing with GPS and digital mapping for a while now, and I've done quite a bit of geocaching over the last few years, including placing our own .  When I started I was using a Garmin GPS V , a great little GPS that can basically do it all - multiple datum switching, realtime path tracking, waypoint extrapolation - you name it, ...

A while back, I went geocaching with my daughter Kate.  We spent quite a while hunting for an elusive cache not far from where we live but we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being outdoors in the sunshine, using GPS technology to have a bit of real world fun. In fact we enjoyed it so much that after we signed the cache's logbook and returned to the car to drive home, Kate asked if we could place our own cache some time for other people to find. What a great idea.  I've been wanting to place a cache of my own for a while, but Katie was the impetus I needed to actually do it.  So, no time like the present, we took a detour on the way home and went via the local Dollar Store, picked out a suitable plastic container, a handful of inexpensive trinkets to include inside it, and a small notebook to use as the logbook... all this for less that $20 (and it could have been much less if we weren't being extravagant with the trinkets) We went home, printed out the official geoc...