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Geocachers -
Geocaching
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Sunday, 29 June 2008 06:57 |
Beneath the dried leaves, grasses and other brown foliage on a vacant lot near Chartan Avenue and Placid Street, 9-year-old Sam Garnett pulled out a camouflage-painted ammunition box.
Inside, he found an action figure, a toy car, a St. Patrick's Day pin from 2000, an adult-size poncho, pens, pencils, children's scissors, a pencil sharpener and more useless brick-a-brac.
But in the world of geocaching, one man's trinket is another man's treasure quest.
Geocaching is the sport of hunting for hidden treasures by tracking coordinates with a GPS unit. The cache is usually held within a Tupperware or metal container that can withstand the elements. What treasure hunters, known as cachers, find inside can be tradable curios, travel bugs--items that need to be moved to a new site--or just a piece of paper for them to log their names and the dates they found it.
For Garnett, a fourth grader at Gehring Elementary School, the hobby takes him places he might never have seen without it.
"I like exploring in these places," he said. "Like Fortification Hill, I got to rock climb a little. It's a good hike and it's cool to see different things."
His father, Steve Garnett, saw his son learn a lesson that day nearly
two years ago when he conquered Fortification Hill, a mountain in
Arizona near Hoover Dam. At first, Sam said he couldn't make it to the
top. Then after a father and son talk, he found the will and beat the
adults to the top.
"For him, it was a moment to overcome
obstacles," Steve said. "He went from being afraid to go to being the
first one to the top. While everyone was stopping and resting, he
powered through it."
Silverado resident Rachelle Faherty also
discovered geocaching could be a bonding activity for her and her
14-year-old daughter. Their cache names are Thing One and Thing Two
after the characters in Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat."
I know
I could hand the GPS to my daughter and she can learn how to find her
way and discover new things," she said. "It's another opportunity to
teach them and make it a family event."
Local cachers hold a few
group events and have adopted a stretch of State Route 159 near Red
Rock Canyon as part of the global cachers' philosophy of preserving the
wild.
But it's mostly an individual sport that's all about the
journey and adventure, said Henderson resident Lynn Storton, the cache
coordinator for Arizona and Nevada.
"It takes you off the beaten path," he said.
The
journey starts with a visit to www.geocaching.com, the official Web
site for worldwide cache locations. Each cacher creates a unique login
name then can hunt for hidden sites. There are 1,904 caches within a
10-mile radius of Silvestri Junior High School and 3,500 within
Southern Nevada.
Some caches require SCUBA gear or mountain
climbing hooks and ropes, but many are hidden in plain view if you know
what to look for.
The inventive hiders paint their caches to
match an electric pole or stuff them inside a hollow fence or rock. One
cache in Henderson is attached to a fishing bob at the bottom of a
tube. Cachers must pour water into the tube so the bob floats to the
top with the coordinates to the next cache.
A cache on Mount
Charleston is a 4-by-8-foot mousetrap with an ammo box sitting where
the cheese would be, said Steve Garnett, aka BroncoCacher. Sam
Garnett's nickname is BroncoCacherJr.
"People are amazingly creative with their hides," Garnett said.
Published in Silverado Home News, April 3, 2008
Written by Jeff Pop
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