Geocachers get hooked on GPS-based treasure hunts

Looking down at his global positioning system unit, then back at the road, Mike Malvick veers to the right, parking his dirty blue Ford Explorer in a small parking lot along Campbell Airstrip Road in Anchorage. He unloads his ski poles, knapsack and two energetic dogs, grabs his GPS and heads into the woods. After a slight incline, the trail opens up to a 180-degree view of Anchorage and Cook Inlet, where Malvick stops to take a photograph.

After consulting his GPS again, he walks a few yards and stops. Instead of continuing down the groomed trail, Malvick turns to his left and trudges through thigh-high snow and dense alders. Pushing branches out of his path, he makes his way to the edge of a gradually sloping hill. Tracing the edge to the right, he climbs over a large, fallen spruce and walks a little farther, reading the distance to his destination indicated on the GPS.

Six feet. Three Feet. Zero.

The object of Malvick’s search is somewhere within a 20-foot radius—the accuracy to which a GPS unit can pinpoint any location on the globe. He begins to look around.

The only landmark not covered by snow is a pair of spruce next to a tall, splintered stump. Malvick circles the trees, feeling the bark and pulling at loose pieces of wood, crouching down to look at them from below. Then he peers from above, looking down into the stump.

Aha!

Pulling back a loose piece of wood, he reveals a bright orange, plastic match holder tucked into a hollowed-out section of the timber. Malvick has found his treasure.

Treasures Everywhere

Scattered from Juneau to Prudhoe Bay and Nome to Fairbanks, plastic containers and ammo cans lie hidden along trails and jammed between tree stumps. They are the prizes in the GPS-guided game called geocaching.

Practically unheard of before 2000, satellite-guided positioning systems have become a popular tool for outdoor enthusiasts. Developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, GPS technology allows travelers to pinpoint their locations on the globe, revolutionizing the way people travel by land, sea and air. Receivers, the basic hardware of a GPS unit, gather signals from three or more satellites to determine the location of the user, providing time, altitude, latitude and longitude.    

Dave Ulmer tested the accuracy of GPS technology on May 3, 2000, one day after the Pentagon eliminated the selective availability of 24 GPS satellites, giving the general public access for the first time. Ulmer stashed a black bucket containing a logbook, pencil and prizes in the woods near Beaver Creek, Ore. He then used his GPS to obtain the bucket’s coordinates—N 45 degrees 17.460 minutes, W 122 degrees 24.800 minutes—and logged the coordinates online to see if others could find his stash using their GPS units. And thus, geocaching was born.

Ulmer’s stash was the first of what is now more than 900,000 geocaches worldwide. Participants post waypoints—the coordinates where they have hidden their caches—online at www.geocaching.com. Others find the hidden prizes using their GPS units and log stories and photos of their adventures on the site. Geocachers spend the majority of their time outdoors, hiking for miles, or walking through towns with GPS units in hand.

A Numbers Game

Geocaching quickly gained a following in Alaska. How could Alaskans resist a new way to explore the outdoors? Today the state boasts more than 3,200 geocache waypoints, mostly in and around urban areas such as Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Despite the activity’s popularity, some of Alaska’s small towns leave geocachers feeling a little left out. Whittier, with a population of fewer than 160, is home to one geocacher, former mayor Ben Butler. After his last term, Butler needed something to keep him busy.

“I feel like the stepchild of the Alaska geocaching community,” said Butler, who envies his Anchorage counterparts’ ability to enjoy geocache waypoints posted by their close neighbors. A trip to Anchorage—about an hour’s drive—is a geocaching marathon for Butler, who visits as many caches as possible on his trips to the city and to other locations across the state. 

Although Butler enjoys locating hard-to-find geocaches, he says the game is more than a treasure hunt for him.

“It’s all about the numbers,” he said.

Butler ranks first in Alaska for the number of caches he has found. Numbers are important to many cachers who are proud to find their names on the www.cacherstats.com, a Web site listing every geocacher worldwide who has logged more than 200 finds.

A Lifesaver

Many cachers disagree with Butler’s emphasis on the numbers. Some use geocaching to get involved in their community or to get outdoors. For a few, it has also become a coping mechanism for life’s most difficult and painful obstacles.

Tamara Spaulding of Big Lake was diagnosed in 2005 with a brain tumor and a blood clot. She began taking blood thinners and soon found that there were times she could not make a fist. Activities she once enjoyed, such as snowmobiling, became impossible.

On Memorial Day that year, her mother died. Spaulding became severely depressed, keeping her curtains closed and never leaving the house.

“My mom was my best friend,” she said.

Then Spaulding discovered geocaching through a friend she met online. After visiting him and his family in California for some geocaching adventures, she was hooked. She began geocaching to cope with her physical ailments and mother’s death.

“Between God and geocaching, that’s what kept me going,” Spaulding said. “Before, I wanted to just die, and geocaching gave me something to look forward to.”

A year after her mother’s death, a fellow cacher helped Spaulding hide a geocache that she named the Charlotte Fouts Memorial Cache on Archangel Road in Palmer.

“I’ve met people I never would have met,” Spaulding said. “I’ve always felt that they’re kindred spirits.”

Spaulding said she now keeps a positive attitude and has set a goal to geocache in all 50 states.

“If I can at least walk, then I’m going to do it,” she said.

Caching in on Education

In 2005, Michael Warren discovered a new way to teach students about geology, science, language arts and technology within the confines of an elective geocaching class. The class has been full every semester since it was first offered at Central Middle School in Anchorage. Warren was thrilled to have kids pulling him aside after taking his class, asking, “What do I do next?”

Geocaching has become the hook introducing students to geospatial technology and skills that could lead to lucrative careers in fields like agriculture and resource exploration. Warren looks at geocaching as a way to get students invested in school at an early age. “If a kid has vision, then they have purpose,” said Warren. “If they have purpose, you can’t stop them.”

Mapping is a major part of Warren’s curriculum. Using the program MapTEACH, students create maps of their neighborhood, campus and city making Anchorage a “living lab” for course content. Assignments also venture out of the city limits. One class project uses satellite imagery and a detailed key to indicate permafrost and earthquake danger in the Fairbanks area.

Walking through Anchorage and finding geocaches brings students to unique locations, which in turn sparks curiosity in students who inquire about Alaska history and industry. Warren describes the sentiment of his students: “We’re not sitting at a desk. We’re not staring at a wall. We’re doing something.”

During the 2006-2007 school year, Warren’s students engaged in a business exchange with the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau by publishing a brochure titled, “Geocaching in Anchorage,” that can be found at prime geocaching destinations such as the ACVB Log Cabin in downtown Anchorage, and the Eagle River Nature Center. Students also create college-level maps, and CDs, DVDs and podcasts that teach both kids and adults about GPS technology.

Summer and Winter, Day and Night

While some cachers put their GPS on the shelf during winter, others see caching as a reason to get outside when temperatures drop.

“Normally, I’d be inside right now,” said Mike Hilliard of Eagle River, walking through the snow on the Tank Trail in Anchorage with his wife, Jessy. “We have some days where we’re walking 14 to 15 miles in the snow. There’s no way I would do that if not for geocaching.”

The couple created a night cache—one that searchers can locate only in the dark—in November 2008.

“We’ve always felt that caches should be winter accessible,” Mike said.

As the sun began to set, Jessy stood at the starting coordinates while Mike walked ahead, piercing spruce trees with reflectors the size of thumbtacks positioned high enough to avoid snow cover. Jessy followed, testing each reflector’s location with her flashlight to make sure it was visible. The couple repeated the process until they reached the final coordinates, located off trail to make sure that muggles—non-geocachers—wouldn’t stumble across it by accident. 

The sky was dark by the time they reached the hiding place for their cache. There they placed two swans, molded in ice, beak to beak under the canopy of roots beneath a fallen tree. A tiny logbook, requiring tweezers to remove, was inside a small tunnel drilled into the tail of one swan. Inside the other tail was a nonactivated micro coin—a form of geocaching swag that is traceable on the geocaching Web site. Acquired by shattering the swan, it was be the prize of the first person to find the cache they named “A Tale of Two Swans.”

After it snowed again, covering their tracks, they posted the starting coordinates of the cache online so that others could follow the reflectors to the swans beneath the stars.

Travel the World

Geocaching can also be a way to see the world. Many cachers have thrown out their travel guides, relying on local caches and cachers to introduce them to an unfamiliar area.

Seattle cacher Jim Pidde held a geocaching competition in 2005, giving eight winners a free ticket to Alaska. Although he doesn’t host a competition anymore, Pidde still brings Seattle cachers to Alaska every year during the annual Geocache Alaska Christmas Party event.

“I like introducing people to Alaska,” Pidde said. “There is a mystique, wild beauty about it that most people don’t get to see.”

Cathy Hornback from Kent, Wash. was lucky enough to win a ticket during Pidde’s contest. Now she visits annually with the Seattle group. A big smile stretches across Hornback’s face when she recalls the first year she visited.

“We were running around like kids for five days, sleeping-slumber party style each night at another person’s house,” she said.

Hornback remembers the generosity of the Alaska geocaching community, called GeoAK! Alaska geocachers were excited to share their stories and their state with visitors and fellow geocaching enthusiasts from the Lower 48.

“People here are wonderful,” Hornback said. “They had an event for us here and 50 people came.”

Pidde also believes the Alaska geocache community is special, which is why he brought Jenn Seva and Raine Lightner from Groundspeak, the Seattle company behind www.geocaching.com, to the 2008 event.

Given the relaxed and excited atmosphere in the room, outsiders would find it hard to believe that most attendees hadn’t met before. Toward the end of the festivities, Seva stood up to address the audience, but her voice cracked and she excused herself for tearing up.

“Some communities are not as warm as you are,” she said. “I personally want to thank you for showing us a good time.”

Then she joked, “I’ve never been to an event in snow pants before and I want to thank GeoAK! for that.”

Serine Halverson is associate editor of Alaska magazine.