The Joy of Geocaching

That’s how many books we hope to sell! But that’s ALSO how many active geocaches there are in the world, according to Geocaching.com’s home page today. So congratulations to an amazing milestone to all our geocaching friends out there. Geocaching (and Groundspeak, their parent company) also celebrates their 10th anniversary this year, so hitting both milestones in the same year is quite impressive.

Our greyhound, Jacoby, has a geocaching account and just placed his first cache not too far from our house, along his usual morning walk route. That got approved yesterday, so his first cache was probably among the last of the 6-digit caches. Congrats to whomever got that millionth cache listed! If you know whom the owner of that cache is, please comment and let us know!

We just found Whisker Walk on the Web (10 times fast!) and now we can’t wait until June 6! If you’re anywhere near Bolton, MA or MA or New England or the East Coast, you should plan to check this out. Whisker Walk looks a bit like Pet Rock Fest with booths for animal and pet charities and rescue groups, but Whisker Walk adds a one-mile walk fundraiser. This year, they’ve added a dog geocaching event, which we can’t wait for! We’ll be bringing Jacoby, who will probably feel overwhelmed but excited to make new friends throughout the day!

We’re also talking to the event organizers to see if we can get a book-signing event organized.

Through Whisker Walk, we found Paws Awhile, an online geocaching community for dog cachers. You heard right, not “catchers,” but “cachers,” one of which JacobyTheGeoGrey is proud to be. If you cache with your pups, register them on Paws Awhile and befriend Jacoby!

It’s official: We’ll be hosting a booth at Geowoodstock VIII in Carnation, WA on July 3. We’ll be signing copies of The Joy of Geocaching and making them available at a special GW VIII discount. We’ll also be running some cool promotions throughout the day and giving away geocoins. More details as we get closer to July 3.

Be sure to sign up for GW VIII and meet us there!

The following review will appears in Library Jounal later this month. The review isn’t online yet, but we got an advance copy from the publisher.

We’re psyched.

Here is an excellent introduction to this emerging sport. For the uninitiated, geocaching is a sort of treasure hunt wherein participants navigate their way to prehidden treasures (caches) using GPS technology. Caches, which are secreted by other practicing geocachers and logged on geocaching web sites, can be located anywhere from parking lots to forested areas.

Longtime tech writer Gillin and his wife, Dana, an editor, are the perfect ambassadors for geocaching. Their book imparts all the how-to that a budding enthusiast needs to get started while also including lots of funny and interesting anecdotes that will communicate to the completely unfamiliar reader just why the sport is exploding in popularity. The book is broken down neatly into chapters on all aspects of geocaching, including hiding, seeking, and the requisite technology.

VERDICT

This is a lively and well-written introduction to a sport that is rapidly gaining followers. It makes a fine source for instruction—its clear writing and personable tone far surpass similar instruction books—but it is also simply an interesting read for all curious about the phenomenon.

—John Helling, Bloomfield-Eastern Greene Cty. P.L., IN

Groundspeak co-founder Bryan Roth contacted us recently to admonish us (gently) for using a Groundspeak trademark on our site without permission (Sorry, Bryan!). We’re never one to pass up an opportunity, so we asked him to answer a few questions. In the process, we discovered that Groundspeak has just started posting statistics about the number of active geocachers worldwide as well as the total numbers of logs filed on the Geocaching.com homepage.

Here’s our brief e-mail interview:

Q: How many active geocachers are there worldwide?

A: Three to four million cachers.  There are some good monthly stats near the bottom of the geocaching.com homepage.  They are updated daily. As of today, There are 973,854 active caches and an estimated 3-4 million geocachers worldwide. In the last 30 days, there have been 2,273,706 new logs submitted.

Q: With smart phones now routinely incorporating GPS receivers, we could be looking at 1 billion people worldwide carrying around GPSrs within a couple of years. What impact do you think that will have on the growth of the game? Is Groundspeak doing anything to take advantage of this growth outside of the iPhone application you built?

A: The addition of new and convenient forms of access to geocaching will allow for more people to hear about it and participate.  In addition to our iPhone application, we will be releasing an Android application shortly, with other platforms to follow.

Q: Is Groundspeak giving any consideration to opening the geocaching.com service as a platform for third-party developers? Similarly, have you given any consideration of licensing the database for developers to build extended services?

A: We have considered both of these options.  We have opened the geocaching service and licensed the database in very limited circumstances for very specific projects.  A complete opening up of the service is not likely in the near term however all options are on the table for the future and we will evaluate them on an ongoing basis.

Q: What’s one of your favorite geocaches?

A: GCG9HP -  I am claustrophobic (somewhat) and this cache really helped me push my own personal limits.  Also, it was super cool to be caching in Finland.

Maureen McArdelle (gipsie), who’s featured in the Joy of Geocaching chapter on “Caching to the Limits,” placed a famous cache series in late 2008 that was created in cooperation with some of the craftiest puzzle cachers in the mid-Atlantic region. She called it Puzzle Masters Challenge (PMC). We looked at the original “PMC – The Final Challenge” and it made our head hurt. So wait’ll you see what Maureen has got up her sleeve this time!

PMC – The Final Challenge (GCZZZZ), involved 17 different puzzle cachers who together created the most difficult puzzle caches they could. “Each of those puzzles had a cryptic clue to a final hidden in Wharton State Forest in NJ,” Gipsie wrote us. “It took almost four months from the time the first cache got published for someone to complete the whole series. It got some pretty good feedback. Only six people or so have completed the whole series, but numerous people have found the separate caches.”

The next challenge is going to be just as difficult, but and added twist is that there will be three versions to complete it. Gipsie writes:

I asked a couple of people from my “extreme” caching team to participate and after some discussion, I could not get them to hide anything with a lower terrain rating, so we began planning an “extreme” version also. Now there are three versions of the series out there, all will have puzzles.

The PMC2 will have a story line similar to the first version, final location yet to be determined. The participants will range from New York to Maryland. I have 18 participants. All puzzles will be 5-star difficulty but no terrain will be higher than a 3 star rating.

The PMC Lite will be almost 30 puzzles with a difficulty rating no higher than three that will lead to a final somewhere near Philly. This will also range from New York to Maryland.

The PMC X has ten participants so far and will range from Connecticut to Maryland with the final probably in the Gunks of NY.

All three series will be out by June. We are holding a PMC event in NJ after all the “feeder” caches are released. It will be designed to announce the releases of the finals and be sort of a puzzle teaching class for those that need help on any of the individual caches.

Facts about Gipsie: She’s found 21 5/5 geocaches and she climbs barefoot! Be sure to subscribe to Gipsie’s blog and note that it will be moving soon to gipsie.weebly.com.

Below is the Google Map for PMC Lite.

WEDU, the PBS affiliate in Tampa/St. Petersburg, FL,  just ran a seven-minute feature on geocaching that featured Scott Veix (InfiniteMPG) and a group of fellow geo-enthusiasts. Scott contributed tons of stories and photos to The Joy of Geocaching.

“It’s not a perfect science,” Scott tells Jack Perkins, host of  “A Gulf Coast Journal. “Your GPS will tell you one second [the cache] is over here and the next second it’s 150 feet away.” Amen, Scott. Geosense is part of the magic.

“Geocaching is providng to be more than a game. It’s about community,” sums up Perkins. ” It’s a game that puts people in touch with nature and in touch with fun. Not a bad way to pass time on a peaceful morning.”

We received an e-mail from a business colleague who’s moving to Boston. She asks:

My husband and I are moving to Boston at the end of the year;  We will be living in the city, so I was hoping that I could use geocaching as a way to explore the place.  But I found very few caches in the city.  Do you have any idea why that is?

We’ve noticed this disconnect as well and, as residents of the Boston area, it troubles us.

It’s especially perplexing given that geocaching has a sort of geeky appeal and Boston, with its more than 60 colleges, has more than its share of techies. We wish we could provide you with a better answer, but all we can do is speculate and quote a passage from The Joy of Geocaching below that delves into regional variations.

There’s no question that geocaching is more popular in warmer regions of the country. In contacting the most prolific geocachers during our research process, we learned that nearly all of them live in temperate climes. This isn’t surprising for a game that is played entirely outdoors and where space is an asset. The vast open areas of Arizona or Nevada simply provide more options for placement.

Urban caches need to be smaller by necessity and the challenges of snow limit hiding places. Still, micro and nano containers aren’t all that difficult to conceal.

There are two possible explanations we can come up with for the paucity of geocaches in Boston. One is that the city has a rich and diverse range of activities available to residents, which could reduce the popularity of geocaching – or any special interest – overall. There simply are a lot of choices for things to do. Boston is an outlier to much of the country in several respects, such as the near total lack of interest in college football.

Another possibility is that the college-age population tends to be transitory, which means it’s more difficult for people to maintain caches that they place.

We hope that as the game continues to spread, Boston’s geocaching deficit will be alleviated. The good news is that there are plenty of options available outside the city, and that’s where the interesting variations in cache types comes into play. Read below for the conclusions we presented in the book:

There are clear differences in the types and hiding places of caches that owners place in different parts of the U.S. For example, the Southwest has lots of parking lot caches because of the large number of sprawling shopping malls in urban areas. Containers tend to be smaller in that region because there’s less vegetation in which to hide them. Floridian InfiniteMPG notes that crevices inside palm tree trunks are such popular hiding places that cachers refer to them as a “typical Florida hide.”

California has “lots of grab-and-gos and puzzles that end at a street lamp,” says dgreno. When hiking through the California desert or elsewhere, look for containers placed under rocks or inside cactuses.

In the rocky, hilly Northeast, geocache density tends to be much lower. It’s harder to run up big numbers there, but searchers are rewarded with long hikes through beautiful wooded areas and a preponderance of multi-caches. Owners are fond of placing containers in the stone walls that snake through the region and caches tend to be placed higher off the ground for accessibility during the winter.

Canadians are fond of burrowing containers into the dense branches of the region’s many fir trees.

We’ve observed anecdotally that there are regional differences in geocache types and styles around the country, but we wanted to test our hypothesis. We ran pocket queries in four areas of the country: Phoenix, Chicago, Knoxville, and our hometown of Framingham, Massachusetts. A search within ten miles of each city hall returned 689 caches in Phoenix, 432 in Chicago, 332 in Knoxville and 340 in Framingham. It’s clear that if you’re looking to run up your numbers, Phoenix is a good place to go.

We then ran the results through GSAK and analyzed the cache types. We found some striking variations.

Phoenix and Knoxville have similar characteristics, although Phoenix has twice the cache density. Chicago has a much larger population of micro caches, which isn’t surprising given its dense urban environment. Our hometown is the outlier: Searchers are much more likely to encounter multi- and puzzle caches, which take longer to find. However, the reward is much more likely to be a large container overflowing with goodies.

Dgreno notes that difficulty and terrain ratings vary by region, too. “Three-star terrain in Utah is what Mt. Everest would be in California,” he says.

Given these facts, it’s not surprising that the most prolific geocache finders tend to live in the southwestern U.S., while the outward-bound extreme cachers cluster in northern and mountainous regions. Keep this analysis in mind when you decide how ambitious you want your own adventure to be.

The Boy Scouts of America is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a serious geocaching initiative. The Get in the Game! geocaching events are built around local activities in which scouts hide caches that spotlight “Scouting’s great gifts to America” as well as the legacy of the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Venturing, Scouting Alumni, and Volunteers. This nationwide initiative is an important endorsement of geocaching by a major organization.

The Scouts want to hear from people who want to help the program. Here’s where you can learn more and contact the organization.

Power cachers are always pushing the limits of the game, and as we were in the final stages of writing this book, we received word of a new record claim by a team that included two people we quote extensively elsewhere: Steve O’Gara (ventura_kids) and Elin Carlson (EMC of Northridge, CA). They joined with f0t0m0m on August 29, 2009 in a midnight-to-midnight run that netted 413 caches in one day.

The trip involved extensive planning using GSAK, Google Earth and Geocaching.com. Ventura_kids created nine possible routes, consuming an estimated 45 hours. The team logged its 100th find at 5:30 a.m. By then, they had already battled swarms of grasshoppers who thought their car was a nifty place to hang out in the darkness of night. All day long, our heroes suffered through heat and dehydration in the process of traveling 471 miles.

We interviewed ventura_kids about this remarkable accomplishment in late September. Listen to the entire interview below.

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Time: 54:17