Geocaching Hobby: How I Became an Experienced Geocacher

The Story of Getting Lost in Rochester, NY

Geocaching (geo-cash-ing) is a high-tech hobby that requires the use of a GPS receiver to find hidden containers in unlikely locales. It is an adventurous, highly addictive treasure hunt that gets you outdoors. I have been caching for about 3 years now and have just about 100 finds. In geocaching terms, it means I’m slow…many find 100 caches in the course of several months (and a friend of mine did recently). If you want to get started in geocaching, you can find the details at the main website www.geocaching.com. Other sites exist with coordinates but this site is super easy to use. It does require you to register in order to view the coordinates but there is no charge for that.

I’m going to tell you a story about an experience I had with my brother. I think it, in its singularity, taught me all the basic skills (and maybe not so basic) that a geocacher needs. It is ingrained in my memory and is the perfect example of any typical geocaching adventure.

My brother lives in Rochester and got me started in geocaching. I went out to visit him one weekend and we decided to find a couple boxes. He knew where to start so he drove us out to this “park”. About all we knew was where we could leave our car and that the boxes were on trails. I had been caching for 2 years and my brother perhaps a year longer than that so we felt pretty comfortable in our skills. We also grew up near the Adirondack Mountains and were completely aware of all hiking safety guidelines and such. My brother had his cell phone with him and I had my GPS. It didn’t look like it’d be too far or take us too long to complete.

My first mistake was feeling over confident and taking for granted the fact that I was in a city. This “park” was large and the trails were overlapping and confusing. We didn’t have a trail map or any idea where some trails led. We figured we’d follow the GPS and sometimes that’s all you need but on this particular day, it wasn’t.