Walking to find treasure
Strap on your socks and sandals, we're going geocaching
Ey up! How are you all doing?
Did you find any treasure amongst the trash and junk on our last walk? If your answer’s no, then fret not because I have you covered in this edition where we go on an Actual Treasure Hunt. Hurrah!
Walking
Geocaching is a treasure hunt where people use an app to follow GPS coordinates to find stashes of hidden objects – known as geocaches or caches. It’s a type of hide-and-seek game where the people who hide the objects – known as cache owners – leave a series of clues to help the people looking for them – known as geocachers or cachers – find them.
It started in May 2000 when the first recorded geocache was placed by Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Oregon. Since then it’s grown into a global outdoor adventure game, with many different apps, millions of caches, and millions of people searching for them in hundreds of countries.
I’d heard about geocaching but hadn't tried it until I started researching ideas for walks to share in The Writer’s Walk. My first impression was that it seemed a bit geeky – hence my tongue-in-cheek image at the top of this post. But having used one of the apps for almost two years, I’ve had a huge amount of fun, walked in places in my local neighbourhood (and across wider London) that I’d never thought to explore, and I’ve learned more about those places along the way. I’ve also found caches in other parts of the UK and in other countries – often combining a regular walk with a spot of geocaching.
To play, you open the app and look on the map for caches near you, select one that you want to find, then use the app to navigate to it:
Each cache has a description, which is the ‘clue’ to start you on your treasure hunt. It gives you an idea of the size of the cache – anything from micro to huge – as well as the difficulty in finding it. Sometimes there are ‘hints’ to give you a bit more to work with.
Sometimes the clues are simple, making the cache easy to find. And sometimes you have to solve a puzzle in order to learn the coordinates that’ll lead you to your treasure. Sometimes cache owners create a treasure trail, where you have to search for each of the caches in a specific order, sometimes combined with clues left at each one that you have to solve in order to find the next cache in the series.
The trail caches are often educational, explaining the history, heritage and stories of the areas where they’re hidden:
The caches themselves are containers that vary in size and shape and can be anything from an acorn-sized container that fits in the palm of your hand, to larger-than-life objects like statues. Cache owners are often very creative with the containers they use – anything from Tupperware to tree trunks:
There’s usually a paper logbook inside the container, which you sign together with logging your ‘find’ on the app. Sometimes, if the container’s big enough, there might be Real Treasure inside it. These are items of low-value, like coins, stickers or trinkets, and the general rule is that if you take something from a cache you should replace it with something else of similar value.
The geocaching community is friendly and welcoming. And the people who ‘own’ the caches put in a lot of time and thought to devising their ‘treasures’, finding locations to hide them in, and then maintaining them – full logbooks have to be replaced and wet weather plays havoc on paper logbooks.
So for your walk this time, I invite you to try geocaching. There are many apps you can try, including ones like Pokémon Go, and you don’t necessarily have to pay to use them. Search for ‘scavenger hunt’, ‘geocaching’ and ‘treasure hunt’ to see what’s out there. I use the Geocaching® app, which is the largest. It’s a ‘freemium’ app, which means it’s free to download and use (there are lots of caches available on the free version) but you can choose to pay a premium to unlock more, if you want to.
One thing to watch out for is the geocaching jargon. The geocaching world comes with a LOT of abbreviations, both in the cache descriptions and in the messages that people leave on the app when logging their finds. Geocaching.com has a glossary – and here are few of the common ones to watch out for:
CO – cache owner: the person who found the cache location, placed the treasure and maintains it
GZ – ground zero: the map coordinates where the cache has been placed
TFTC – thanks for the cache: when you find a cache, you log it in the app and it’s customary to thank the cache owner for placing it
DNF – did not find: a comment you’ll often see on cache logs where the person who searched for it came away empty handed
Writing
One of the things I love about geocaching is the enthusiasm of everyone who takes part. The cache owners clearly dedicate a lot of time and thought into planning their locations and descriptions, designing puzzles for the more challenging hunts, and then maintaining their caches whenever they need a bit of love and attention.
The geocachers who go in search of these treasures are also enthusiastic. Read through the ‘Activity’ section on the app and you’ll see the comments from everyone who found the cache before you. Many geocachers go into great detail about the adventures and excitement they had while searching for the treasure. Look at the detail and joy in these 2 comments in the log book of a cache hidden at a motorway services:
So for your writing task, I want you to get creative with your comments when you find a cache and log it on the app. Let people know if it was your first cache, tell them of the challenges you faced in searching for it, the adventures along the way and what you thought to the cache container and what you found inside it. And don’t forget to thank the cache owner (that’s CO in geocaching lingo) for the cache – TFTC.
Even better, please let me and the rest of The Writer’s Walk community know what you found on your walk by leaving a comment on this edition.
I share an edition of The Writer’s Walk every fortnight and the next one was due to go out on Wednesday 20 December. But if your inbox is anything like mine is at the moment, then it’s likely to be overflowing with seasonal offers, discounts, invites and general email chaos.
So this is my last edition of 2023 – although I’ll still publish my Friday Fragments each week. I don’t send those by email, so you can read them by going to my Substack page, following me on the Substack app, or connecting with me on Instagram.
I’ve loved writing these posts for you this year and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them. Happy walking and writing until next year.
Sarah
Love those socks!