A technological treasure hunt

Dear PropellerHeads: A friend told me about a treasure hunting game you can play with a GPS. It sounded pretty cool. What can you tell me about it?

A: It sounds as if your friend was talking about geocaching, one of a new generation of games that rely heavily on technology. However, unlike Xbox and Wii, this one gets you outdoors in the sunshine. Remember the sun?

Geocaching is simple in concept. A geocache is a small hidden container that holds a "treasure" in the form of trinkets and a logbook. It is hidden by a geocacher, who notes the location coordinates on a GPS. Then the coordinates are published on the Internet so that other people can hunt for the cache using their own GPS units, like a hi-tech pirate's map.

In fact, a geocache is a bit like pirate treasure, but without the rum and parrots. If you find a geocache, you are allowed to take one of the trinkets, as long as you leave one of similar value, and you are expected to sign the logbook. This lets the geocacher know how many people have found the cache.

Geocaching is a fairly new activity. It became possible sometime around midnight on May 2, 2000. That's when President Clinton directed the Air Force to turn off the "selective availability" feature of the GPS satellites, instantly rendering all GPS receivers far more accurate than before. Who says the government never does anything right?

This inspired a fellow geek named Dave Ulmer to rush out and hide a bucket of "treasure," including software (I told you he was a geek), in the woods. Using his GPS unit, he noted the coordinates, and then was promptly eaten by a bear. Not really, but he did go home and publish them on a GPS user group message board. Before the end of the week, two people had found the cache, and a new game was born. By the end of May 2000, the new activity had been officially christened "geocaching."

Although just over 11 years old, geocaching has exploded in popularity, with thousands of caches and hunters. There is a website devoted to the game (geocaching.com) and a Geocaching for Dummies book is available on Amazon.com (you know something is mainstream when they publish a Dummies guide for it). Chances are there is a geocache within a few miles of your home.

If you own a smart phone, there are several geocaching apps available. My personal favorite, called Geocaching, is available for all platforms and costs about $10. The most popular freebie is called c:geo, but it offers a smaller database of caches. All of them tap into the GPS functions of your phone to provide interactive maps to the treasure, along with how close you are to the cache, and hints to help you locate it. You can also hunt for caches using a regular GPS device, but you will not get all the interactive goodies that come with the apps.

To prepare for this article, I decided to try finding a geocache for myself, just the sort of dedication you expect from your friendly neighborhood PropellerHeads. Unless you download one of the smart phone apps, you have to register at geocaching.com to get the coordinates for caches, but it's free and painless. There are several caches within minutes of my home. The nearest one, marked as 1.5 (easy) on a difficulty scale of 1 to 5, was reportedly "in plain sight." Humming a pirate shanty, I set out to find the treasure.

Shiver me timbers! I couldn't find it. According to my Android, I walked all around it, but it eluded me. By golly, I'm gonna go back out there tomorrow and look again. There's no way I'm going to be defeated by a measly 1.5 difficulty geocache. I predict that if you have a GPS and a sense of adventure, you'll find geocaching addictive too. Just watch out for bears.

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. Email them to [email protected] or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.