Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (30 page)

Geocaches have changed a little since Dave Ulmer’s day. In fact, his historic first cache would be quickly rejected today by the network of
Geocaching.com
volunteers that vets all new caches, since it breaks several of their cardinal rules: no buried caches, no food, no money. But the essentials of the game are still exactly what he proposed in his 2001 Usenet post. A container is hidden somewhere in the world—the container might be big or small, elaborately camouflaged or just a simple piece of Tupperware. In addition to a paper log, the cache may contain “swag”—cheap trinkets that finders can swap. The latitude and longitude of the hide are posted on the Web, and anyone with a GPS receiver is free to find it and sign the log with their name (or, more often, their geocaching “handle”). Most will return to
Geocaching.com
and post a log there as well, describing their experience.

Never having found a geocache myself, I’m a little skeptical—can something that sounds so much like a Boy Scout merit badge actually be any fun? The only GPS device in the Jennings home is “Daniel,” the low-end Garmin navigator suction-cupped to the windshield of our car. Daniel is actually the name of the English-accented voice we’ve selected the device to speak in; the factory default was “Jill,” a high-maintenance-American voice that we can’t stand. When you make a wrong turn, Jill’s error message of “Recalculating!” is an aggrieved sigh. Daniel’s “Recalculating,” by contrast, is in the calm, silky tones of an old family chauffeur. He never judges you. (Actually, our Daniel hasn’t said “Recalculating” since I figured out how to hack into his text files. He now says, “You turned the wrong way, dumb-ass. Just do what I say,” which is a source of endless delight to the backseat.) The kids treat Daniel like a member of the family. A few months ago, as we were walking through a science museum exhibit about GPS, Dylan said wistfully, “I wish Daniel was here. He’d
love
this.”

We don’t have a handheld GPS, but I remember what Jeremy Irish told me when I visited his office at Groundspeak: “Geocaching is a trick to get kids to go outside. That was our original mantra.” I’d love to see Dylan out exploring the woods behind our house, following ants and building forts and damming streams on a sunny afternoon, but despite our best efforts, he’s a true child of the twenty-first century: send him outside, and he’ll just
stand there
for twenty minutes with his nose pressed against the sliding glass door, like the world’s saddest garden gnome.

But nerdy kids are often big geocachers. Imagine: a treasure hunt just like the ones in books, only there are hundreds of them within a few miles of your house! To an adult, the search is its own reward, but for a child, it seems too good to be true that the search’s end is often a trove stuffed with green army men, Happy Meal toys, plastic jewelry, and other priceless treasures.

My wife thinks it’s worth a shot. “Dylan will do anything if you give him a twenty-five-cent toy at the end,” she says. “That’s why he’s always asking when we can go back to the dentist.”

“Apparently it’s totally catching on now that so many people have GPS devices in their phones,” I tell her. “
Look at this list
of famous people who geocache. Mia Farrow, Wil Wheaton, Ryan Phillippe. The drummer from Poison.”

Mindy actually seems interested for the first time. “Wait, he goes geocaching with only one arm?”

“From Poison, not Def Leppard!”

A week later, Dylan and I drop sixty bucks on a kid-friendly Geomate.jr, which comes covered in pale green rubber and preloaded with a quarter of a million cache locations. We slip in a pair of batteries, and thirty seconds later its little digital-watch screen is telling us there’s a cache exactly 0.17 mile southeast of our front door. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. “It’s only nine hundred feet that way,” I say as we strike out down the driveway, with Dylan waving his GPS back and forth in front of him at arm’s length, like it’s Fisher-Price’s My First Dowsing Rod. “It must be on the back of that hill across the road.”

Geocachers always talk about how the joy of caching is in the
journey, in the chance to stop and see the unexpected places right under your nose that you otherwise would have driven right past. In fact, it’s so axiomatic that geocaching will reveal the hidden secrets of your neighborhood that there’s even an acronym in the trade for it: YAPIDKA, meaning “Yet Another Park I Didn’t Know About.” This is the lasting appeal of the game to Dave Ulmer, who now spends the entire year motoring around the West in an RV. (When I spoke to him, he was camping in the Bradshaw Mountains just south of Prescott, Arizona.) He doesn’t log his finds anymore, but, he says, “The minute I get the slightest bit bored, I’ll bring up
Geocaching.com
and see what’s in my area. I don’t care about the box full of trinkets, but I might find an Indian corral or a fabulously unusual geologic site or lava caves or a beautiful forest viewpoint. You’re not going to stumble on that on your own. But with geocaching, you just walk right up to it.”

I’m not expecting the woods across the street from my house to hide any mysteries greater than a few broken beer bottles, but once Dylan crests the hill I hear him yell, “Whoa, Dad, come check this out!” The Douglas firs on the hillside—the same ones I can see out my office window every day—conceal an elaborate network of wooden boardwalks and ramps winding through the forest, sometimes as high as ten feet in the air. We’ve been living across the street from an Ewok village for three years and never knew!

“Some older kids built this to jump their BMX bikes,” explains a neighborhood girl, cutting through the woods with her friends. I’m trying to listen politely without taking my eyes off Dylan, who is running up and down the ramps making rocket-ship noises and—hopefully—not getting tetanus from anything rusty and pokey. “But they left and went to college, I think. Nobody uses them now.”

I look down at our toy receiver. My coordinates have “zeroed out”; I’m now standing on a uniquely specified point on the Earth’s surface, right down to one-thousandth of a minute of longitude and latitude. I’m unexpectedly awestruck at something I take for granted when I use GPS to navigate in the car: every time I take a few steps, the numbers change on the toy in my hand, and that’s because it’s listening to machines
in space
. A $20 billion array of sophisticated military satellites
is helping me find Tupperware in the woods. Truly we are living in the future.

But where’s the cache? I have yet to develop what cachers call “geosenses,” the seemingly extrasensory ability to get inside the head of the hider, to look at a landscape and spot the likely hiding places of the “geojoy.”
^*
No GPS locator is correct down to a single foot, of course. My readings are dependent on the time it’s taking signals to bounce off a constellation of six overhead satellites, and if signals start bouncing off of other things—these tall trees, for example—rather than traveling into space in a straight line, small errors will creep in. I know the cache is somewhere in a tight radius around these coordinates, but Space Command can’t actually tell me, “It’s in that hollow log, dummy!”—I have to look. I kick through leaves, I lift up rocks, I reach under tree roots. It’s exactly as much fun as looking for your car keys or searching for your retainer in a cafeteria garbage can. People do this for fun?

But then comes the epiphany. I’m standing at the base of the highest dirt-bike ramp when I realize: geocaching coordinates include only latitude and longitude. What about the Z-axis? What about height? I inch my way up the rickety wooden track. Dylan wants to come too, until he gets halfway up and then realizes he liked it just fine on the ground. At the highest point, where the teenagers used to turn their bikes around, I reach my hand under the platform, and there’s something square and metallic. “I got it! I got it!” I shout, euphoric with the unexpected endorphin rush of
finding
. Aha.
That’s
why people do this for fun.

Dylan opens the little box and it’s love at first sight: a Cracker Jack carton without any of that stupid popcorn or peanuts, just cheap toys. To a six-year-old, it might as well be diamonds and rubies. He spots a plastic sheriff’s badge he wants, so he digs around in his pocket until he finds an unused Chuck E. Cheese token and leaves that in its place. I sign the log, carefully replace the cache in its perch, and we head for home as Dylan babbles cheerfully. “Dad, when can we come back and
play on the ramps? Dad, are there any more geocaches on our street? Dad?” Score: geocaching 1, video games 0.

Somewhere in the vicinity of five million people are active geocachers, and the rules of the game are scanty enough that no two people play it quite alike. The vast majority are casual cachers, who might occasionally spend a sunny afternoon driving around town with a spouse or kids in tow, looking for a few easy grabs. On a road trip, or with time to kill before an appointment in an unfamiliar part of town, they might think to pull out their smartphone to see if there’s a geocache nearby. They are sensible, temperate souls, not prone to crazy obsessions of any kind, and so they are deeply respected by their neighbors and community. Let us speak no more of them.

But some geocachers are more obsessive and their quarries more elaborate. “Extreme cachers,” for example, literally risk life and limb for no other reward than an elusive “smiley”—the happy-face icon that signifies a successful find on
Geocaching.com
. They’re not going to waste their time on any cache that’s not hidden over a cliff or in an abandoned mine shaft, up a forty-foot oak tree or at the bottom of the Great Salt Lake. They speak in hushed whispers of great white whales like Psycho Urban Cache #13, a legendary West Virginia cache that was dropped via helicopter atop a seventy-foot pylon in the middle of the Potomac River.
^*
Some of these caches are so extreme that they’ve
never
been found, like Gokyo Ri, left on one of the highest peaks of the Nepalese Himalayas in 2004, or Rainbow Hydrothermal Vents, left by a Russian Mir submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 2002.
^†

“Puzzle caching” is extreme caching for the mind, and its devotees
forgo scuba or rock-climbing gear in favor of a simpler piece of equipment: the sharpened pencil. A puzzle cache is suggested by a tantalizing blue question mark on the
Geocaching.com
maps, because it’s the only type of geocache that
doesn’t
come with a latitude and longitude. Instead, would-be finders must outwit some kind of diabolical puzzle—crack a code or answer an un-Google-able quiz or riddle—to decipher the correct coordinates. With its high per capita density of software engineers and other pasty computer types, Seattle is a hotbed for this kind of cache, and soon I’m hooked. No matter how esoteric the subject—backgammon, twentieth-century earthquakes, Chinese characters—I’m willing to dive into it for a “smiley.” One cache requires me to master the matrix that transforms the RGB colors on my computer monitor into the YIQ system used by color TVs. For another, I have to calculate the “geographic centroid” of Seattle—the point at which you could balance the city on the head of a sufficiently sturdy pin. At one low point, I even rent the Uma Thurman movie
Prime
in order to derive a set of coordinates from the MPAA registration number at the end of its credits. I feel a vague kinship with extreme-caching daredevils whenever I find one of these caches—I may not have rappelled down a sheer cliff face, but I did have to face
some
grueling ordeal, whether it was matrix algebra or a lousy Uma Thurman rom-com. Signing each log, it feels as though I’ve
accomplished
something.

Extreme cachers and puzzle cachers might take hours or even days to notch a single geocache; they prize quality over quantity. Power cachers, on the other hand, are the bottomless gourmands of the geocaching world. Their dictum is to cache as much as possible for as long as possible. On September 27, 2010, a two-person team from Malibu calling themselves “ventura_kids” set a new world record by finding
1,157 caches in a single day
.
^*
Do the math: that’s a new cache every minute and fifteen seconds . . . for twenty-four hours. By comparison, Dylan
and I spent more than an hour finding that BMX cache, and that was just a stone’s throw from our front yard. The key to this kind of brutal efficiency is planning. The ventura_kids’ entire route was charted in advance, in an area with no traffic or stoplights. Their Jeep was stocked for any eventuality, including ten gallons of gas and headlamps for each cacher. At each stop, team members would scramble like a pit crew, typically uncovering the cache before the driver even had his GPS device unmounted from the dashboard. (They used preprinted stickers instead of signing in ink, which saved precious seconds.) “Pace yourselves,” Steve O’Gara of ventura_kids advised anyone on the
Geocaching.com
forums who might want to follow in his team’s footsteps. “Try not to get any injuries near the beginning. Keep drinking water. Stop for a picture now and then. Watch out for scorpions, and cactus.”

Even so, this amazing marathon was possible only because of the venue chosen: rural roads in the high desert of south-central Nevada. Many of these highways are “power trails,” in which easy-to-find cache containers have been placed every 528 feet (by
Geocaching.com
rules, no two caches may be closer to each other than a tenth of a mile) along the side of a road, usually at the bases of electrical poles. Why leave a trail of geocaches along an ugly highway, rather than in some scenic nature spot? To encourage feats of speed like this one, of course.