Cache And Carry

My wife and I are enjoying our usual summer vacation in Utah. We spent the first several days down south, hiking Capitol Reef and Grand Staircase, and are now in Brighton trekking the alpine clime.

Notable for this trip, though, is the GPS unit we've added to the family, and with it we've discovered geocaching. What is geocaching, you ask? From Wikipedia:

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that involves the use of a Global Positioning System (“GPS”) receiver to find a “cache” placed anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small, waterproof container full of “treasures”. Geocaching is a unique take on a traditional Easter-egg hunt in that it uses two recent technologies, the GPS and the Internet.

One participant will place the cache and note its coordinates. These coordinates, along with other details of the location are posted online. Other players obtain the coordinates from the Internet and, using handheld GPS receivers, seek out the caches, hoping to record their exploits in a logbook contained therein. Geocachers are free to take objects from the cache, in exchange for leaving something in return, so there's always a “treasure” for the next person to find.

We've found three caches so far:

• Mary Practice Cache (MPC) (Brighton, UT)

• Black Boulders Cache (Capitol Reef, UT)

• Brighton Up Your Day (Brighton, UT)

We've had a great time, and plan to hike caches the rest of the trip. If you want to learn more about geocaching, I'd suggest a visit to the geocache center of the universe: Geocaching.com.