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Hidden treasures 
CLUE: Austin Resident Julie Perrine locates another clue while searching for her next treasure. Perrine said she has no problem finding 100 caches in a day. |
By Victoria Rossi Geocaching a game of high-tech hide-and-seek Heather Ford is sending a present. It's called a “travel bug,” and right now it sits somewhere on the border between Indiana and Ohio. She monitors its location online and waits for someone else to find the small coin and take it from its starting point in Hutto all the way to her mother-in-law's nursing home in Japan. Until then it will hitchhike across the country, courtesy of modern day treasure hunters who use satellite technology to find trinkets like Ford's, and then re-hide them up a cliff, under lampposts, at the bottom of a lake - wherever they want. They're known as geocachers, participants in a high-tech hide-and-seek game called geocaching. Players hide caches - any kind of container ranging from a small film canister to a bucket within a bucket within something much, much larger - and then post the latitude and longitude of the hiding place online. People all over the world punch those coordinates into their hand-held GPS receivers and go where the arrow takes them. Sometimes the arrow will follow a trail in a state park; other arrows point to strip mall parking lots. All lead to some kind of treasure: Poems, packaged toothbrushes, tiny Buddha statues, whatever the cacher chooses to leave. People play fair most of the time, but every once in a while coordinates lead straight to a garbage heap. There's also a report of police exploding a cache made to look like a pipe bomb. In May 2000, then-President Clinton made global positioning systems available to civilians, so that anyone with $100 to spare for a GPS tracking device could learn their position in the world to within 33 feet. The world's first geocache was planted in the woods near Portland, Ore., the following day. Today, more than 480,000 caches are registered online and can be found on every continent. At first glance, the game may sound easy, except that players could hide their caches in fake rocks or on mountain peaks. Metal and tall trees can mess up the satellite signals. There's poison ivy, ants, snakes and suspicious, or maybe just bemused, security guards wondering why you're hovering around lamp posts outside of Home Depot at 4 a.m. All caches contain a logbook to sign so other geocachers know you've been there. This is what gives some people the adrenaline rush that keeps them addicted to the sport: signing as many logbooks as they can, sometimes within the span of a day. Intense geocachers will get up at 6 a.m. and come home after the sun goes down. Others take off at 3 a.m. to be the first person to reach a new cache that has been posted online. Austin Resident Julie Perrine - known in the geocaching forums as Mrs. Captain Picard - has no problem finding 100 caches in a day. She kayaks and bikes and jeeps to caches, plans her trips around caches. She's No. 1 in the state of Texas and, with 10,807 logbooks signed, No. 16 in the world. She does it for the thrill of the chase, she said. “And every once in a while you'll find something that just absolutely delights you,” Perrine said. You can “put some of your personality” into the caches you hide, she said, take geocachers to sites you like or pull pranks on other players. Mrs. Captain Picard's favorite cache is one in which she forces its finders to declare their devotion to - guess who - Star Trek's Captain Picard. Ford, a Hutto resident, has a more laid back approach to geocaching. She looks up coordinates in the morning, then finds a few caches on her way back from work in College Station. But then again, she's only been geocaching for 11 months; Perrine has been at it for more than five years. She likes the idea of all this treasure hidden unbeknownst to laymen, or “muggles” as they're known to the geocaching community after the term popularized by the Harry Potter book series for humans unaware of the wizard world. “You're finding this stuff right under your nose and the general population doesn't know it exists,” she said. “It's kind of like a little club. You could drive by one every day and have no clue it was there.” Indeed, the secretiveness of the sport is one of its main appeals. Ford recently found herself in a McDonald's drive-through on Christmas day, taking advantage of the low traffic flow to search for a cache that she still can't find. East Williamson County isn't exactly a geocaching hotspot, Ford said, though there are reputed to be several caches hidden around Granger Lake and one to be found in a Taylor historical landmark - she won't say where, though. “I'd get in real trouble,” she said. Trouble with the online geocaching community, that is. Some players are known solely by their online profiles and the names found in logbooks. There are, however, social activities available to anyone who's up for it. Perrine, for instance, recently posted an online invitation for fellow geocachers to a “pep rally and juggling show,” she said. She feels a certain connection to geocachers she's never met, too, and a sense of gratitude for crafting all the adventures she's taken the last five years. Like the time that she, at 47, folded her knees against her chest and shimmied up a crack in a cliff face to reach a cache waiting at the top. “This was an adventure that someone I don't know put there for me to have,” she said.
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