I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why I find Geocaching so compelling. There hasn’t been many things in my life that have caused such a difference in what I do in my spare time.

There are some things that’s I’ve stopped doing entirely and others that I do much less – like sleeping. Weeknights are for solving puzzles, creating tools that make geocaching quicker and more efficient, and plotting my next trips. Early weekend mornings, while Anne is still asleep, is for going out and grabbing a few caches before whatever we decide to do that day, which might just be more Geocaching.

What could possibly make going on long hikes, risking snake bites, ticks, poison oak and other personal injury just to find some tupperware with cheap trinkets inside? And repeat it coming up on 1000 times? Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1) You get to play with gadgets. A GPS is a pretty amazing device on its own, but you get to use all kinds of geek equipment like my Treo and hiking gear.

2) You get to play with maps. Maps are very interesting to look at. There’s near infinite detail and it’s personally relevant. It’s not just your paper fold-out maps either. Most of the maps I use are on my laptop, the web, or the GPS itself. There are street maps, arial maps, satellite maps, and topographical maps providing more and more detail. I spend hours looking at caches overlaid on these maps and creating new ones based on my travels.

3 I’ve always enjoyed hiking, ever since my trips with the MOTD back in high school. There’s a lot of hiking involved in geocaching if you choose to go for those.

4) Geocaching, especially in the Bay Area is about mental challeges as well as physical. Puzzles here range from looking up simple information to solving complex crytography. Others have no particular strategy – you just have to stare at them long enough until you see the pattern and can produce coordinate numbers from it. While my job is full of intellectual challenges, I don’t often have the time to sit down and focus on a particular problem which is purely intellectual.

Sometimes the mental effort comes when you actually go to find the cache to unveil some clever camoflauge. Caches can be disguised as sprinkler heads, stumps, rocks, dirt, fences, or have plants glued to them.

5) Geocaching is a great way to satisfy your curiosity of your environment.
When I was a kid, I would often go ‘exploring’ which just meant wandering through the small wood behind our backyard. I guess I’m still just exploring.
I’ve seen amazing places I never would have known existed, just a few miles from home. I’ve certainly gotten to know my way around the Bay Area much better than before too.

If you were to ask Anne why she’ll go with me on hunts, this is the reason (and probably the only ONLY one she’d give).

6) Every kid imagines he’s a spy on a secret mission. In the real world there aren’t many secret missions (except if you really are a spy) but geocaching is pretty close. Not everyone would leave a geocache intact if they were to run across it by accident, so they’re hidden and you have be stealthy when looking for a cache. This can be a real challenge in busy places like a store parking lot.

7) I wouldn’t call myself a particularly social person, but I do enjoy sharing my experiences geocaching and reading about other peoples experiences at the same caches. Through event caches, trading hints, and group gatherings for hikes, I’ve met some interesting people and some really nerdy and strange people as well!

8) People like to collect things. It could be baseball cards or tea cups for some people, but for me it’s collecting caches. My particular aim is to see how big a radius I can create from home where I’ve found all the caches. With a few exeptions I’m at about 9 miles right now. It’s challenging because as you clear out an area, new caches are more likely to appear and then you have to go back. It also means that you can’t skip any of them, including all the super-difficult puzzles created by silicon valley engineers.

Other people have different goals, like finding 365 in one year or solving just the puzzles.

That’s quite a few reasons why I cache, but caching is also good for me in ways I never expected.

For one it’s great exercise. On a typical weekend I’ll end up getting outside and hiking or walking 20 miles.

Apparently it’s also a good way to lose weight. Someone recently asked me if I had lost weight and I responded with “I don’t think so.” I found a scale and decided to see. To my astonishment, I had lost 20 pounds since I last checked!
I used to run to try to keep in shape, but it was always hard to motivate myself to do it and I never really lost any weight because of it (not that it was ever the primary goal.) Since geocaching I’ve given up on running because I’m much better at exercising when there is an easily identifiable goal – in my case, a cache!

I’ve definitely learned a lot from geocaching, in areas I never would have thought of. To find caches, I’ve had to learn braille, several foreign languages, cryptogrphy, trivia of all sorts and had to refresh some of my math skills. Oh, and I’m now an expert at identifying poison oak.

Geocaching.com also promotes its “Cache In Trash Out” program so I’m picking up trash at the same time.

Finally I’ve made some new friends through caching. We didn’t know many people in the bay area when we moved here two years ago except for those people we had met in other places and happened to be living here now and most of them have moved away by now.

Most of the friends we’ve made are not people we would have met otherwise. For some reason, we don’t fit the Geocaching demographic. They mostly seem to much older – often with kids that are of signifigant age themselves. No matter – they’re still good people and we’ve come to know pretty much all the serious cachers in the area, often running into them at cache sites.

I’m not sure when or if I will burn out on caching. Sometimes when I’m finishing a long weekend of 30+ caches I think I’ve done enough, but a few days later I’m motivated again to go out and find a bunch more. There are over 3000 caches I haven’t found within a hundred miles of home, so it’s unlikely I’m going to run out. The top geocachers have thousands of finds. Having close to 1000 puts me at only #16 – in just the bay area.

If you haven’t tried Geocaching yet, I highly recommend you pick up a cheap gps and go for a few. It’s simply a lot of fun.