Geocaching
Treasure hunting with GPS
Geocaching is a high tech treasure hunt where you use a global positioning satellite receiver (GPSr), either as a GPS unit or smartphone, to find “caches” that other people have hidden.
It started in 2000 when the USA Department of Defence took the “wobble” off the satellite system. All of a sudden they were accurate to within a few feet. The day after an American called Dave Ulmer hid the first cache and put its location on the internet. Geocaching had been born. Now there are now almost three million caches located in nearly every country in the world.
So what’s in a cache? Its normally a small box with a log book inside and lots of inexpensive trinkets (normally aimed at children). Caches are hidden, sometimes very ingeniously, but never buried.
For more information and to get started, have a look at the geocaching.co.uk website.
The aim is to take the location and clue from the website, load it into your GPSr and find the cache. Sign the log book, take a trinket out of the cache replace it with something different. At the end of the day you log your finds on the website.
If you would like to have a go, the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre will hire you a GPSr, show you how to use it and give you the leaflet for one of their own geocaching trails.
There are geocaches on many sections of the Shropshire Way and on the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail.