Geocache Journal

Geocaching uses GPS gear to point the way to adventure

by Jeff on August 19, 2008

By Joshua Winata
Killeen Daily Herald

There were only two days until the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division was scheduled for deployment to Afghanistan on June 26, but instead of using his lunch break to make preparations, Staff Sgt. Brian Heitman was out looking for hidden treasure.

Armed with a hand-held Global Positioning System device on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, Heitman navigated his family’s Honda Odyssey van up Lutheran Church Road, a dusty white trail leading north out of Copperas Cove, following a set of coordinates. His target: two new geocaches placed the day before.

Heitman is one of a community of treasure seekers engaged in a worldwide adventure game known as geocaching. Around the world, right under people’s noses, are thousands of hidden “geocaches,” usually a simple camouflaged canister or box containing a log and several trinkets. The object is to find as many as possible. To discover where these coveted containers are hidden, participants look online at Geocaching.com or other Web sites to find coordinates and clues that lead them into everyday adventures, often right in their own towns.

Herald/JOSHUA WINATA
Staff Sgt. Brian Heitman hunts underneath some rocks, where he suspects a geocache might be hidden during a recent hunt near Copperas Cove.Herald/JOSHUA WINATA
Community Emergency Response Team members Teddy Bruschi, left, and Priscilla Beauregard sync their Global Positioning Systems before a geocaching trip through Ogletree Gap Park last Monday.

Herald/JOSHUA WINATA
Community Emergency Response Team members Teddy Bruschi, left, and Priscilla Beauregard sync their Global Positioning Systems before a geocaching trip through Ogletree Gap Park last Monday.In the Heart of Texas geocaching region, which spans a 100-mile radius around Waco, there are about 9,000 geocaches, according to Geocaching.com. Killeen has about 65 hidden in city limits, but the greatest concentrations in the area are found around Copperas Cove, which has an estimated 150 geocaches, and the parks around Stillhouse Hollow Lake, which contain more than 100 of them.

Geocachers agree that it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

“It’s the thrill of the hunt,” said Heitman, who also goes by his geocaching name, SDAJumpmaster. “I really don’t care what’s in the container. I just want to find it.”

Achieving goals

There is a competitive element to the game as well, although there is no score. Usually geocachers compete against themselves to achieve personal goals, or they enjoy matching wits with those who have hidden the containers to see if they can outmaneuver one another.

During his final trip in Cove prior to his deployment, Heitman reached his goal of finding 1,111 geocaches before leaving town. The first geocache, a coffee can hung from the branch of a tree, required a little climbing. Another was a small canister at the bottom of a shallow water crossing, anchored down with a rock and some string.

For soldiers like Heitman, geocaching provides a free, fun and safe release from the stresses and uncertainties of military life.

“I have other things that I do in my off time, but this is the one thing where I feel a sense of accomplishment. When I’ve gone out and found a few, I have a positive outlook,” Heitman said. “I can do anything, and a lot of other things in my life tend to drag me down.”

Heitman also heads of up the local chapter of the Military Association of GeoCaching, a loosely organized network that helps get military personnel plugged into the hobby. The organization aims to help to those who have been transferred to another military post get plugged into their new home and meet other local geocachers. Heitman said his GPS hunts are what got him acquainted with the Copperas Cove community when he moved to the city last March.

“When I first got here, I was without my family and had nothing to do but geocache,” he said. “I learned every side street and everything back here in this area.”

Military benefits

While soldiers find useful benefits in geocaching, the hobby benefits more from the military than the other way around, Heitman said. While assigned to funeral detail, Heitman has uncovered caches in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The military also carries local participants to far away lands to access finds no one else can reach. Aside from a handful of contractors, the 253 geocaches in Iraq and the 71 Afghanistan are logged primarily by deployed servicemen.

Although there are no geocaches on Fort Hood, since they are prohibited on federal property, geocaches are restricted to military bases in overseas war zones so only those with clearance can track down the coordinates. They are also strategically placed away from buildings or densely populated areas so as not to become targets for the enemy.

“There’s a sense of accomplishment when you find something in another country. We get to find countries no one else gets to find,” said Heitman, who found three in Iraq during his last deployment.

Around Kandahar Airfield where he is stationed, there are 11 identified caches, and Heitman plans to find them all. He will also be adding to the Afghanistan collection with about 25 traveling geocaches that he has stuffed into his rucksack and duffel bag.

Not just a military thing

Interest in geocaching extends well beyond the military. Battalion Chief Gary Young of the Copperas Cove Fire Department, an avid geocacher who has logged 519 finds in almost three years, said the hobby has practical applications in land navigation and search and rescue.

During the June 3 grass fire in Killeen that scorched 200 acres, Young used GPS technology to mark the command post, the nearest fire hydrant and the entrance to the safe zones in the severe smoky conditions.

“On the emergency services side of it, (geocaching) keeps me very, very proficient in how to use a GPS and how to navigate,” said Young, who is known in the geocaching world as fyrhydrant.

Young promotes the hobby when training firefighters, and uses draws on geocaching concepts when coming up with emergency preparedness drills for volunteers.

Teddy Bruschi and Priscilla Beauregard, also known as skibrew and 306Catlady, are Community Emergency Response Team members who were introduced to geocaching through Young.

“That’s why we joined CERT and all these other clubs. I’m retired. We get out and do things,” Bruschi said. “It’s not boring sitting in a classroom doing the same thing over and over again. Each one is different.”

At ages 55 and 69, respectively, Bruschi and Beauregard also enjoy the exercise that keeps them active and healthy as they grow older.

On June 20, the friends hiked through the untamed wilderness of Ogletree Gap Park, climbing through shoulder-high grasses and brush in search of geocaches. Although they both admitted that their knees were giving way by the end of the day, they both easily kept pace on the densest and steepest terrain.

For all ages

Geocaching is for all ages, and parents often capitalize on the activity to keep their children entertained. Michele McGuire, her husband, Michael, and their children, Jason, Andrew and Caleb, use family geocaching trips as valuable bonding time.

“They’re not at home watching Nick at Nite,” McGuire said. “They’re out with their parents going on adventures. How cool is that?”

On June 20, the McGuires joined Young and his daughter, Shelby, for a geocaching adventure at Central Texas College, where they uncovered three newly placed finds.

They passed on one geocache that was located where a party was being hosted outdoors – it was too risky with so many “Muggles,” a term borrowed from the popular Harry Potter series, nearby. Participants prefer to engage in geocaching incognito so that others not involved in the hobby don’t find and destroy cache contents.

McGuire said she and her children sometimes make up stories to distract Muggles. To conceal their geocaching expeditions, the family has at various times pretended to be building inspectors, to look for a lost phone or to hunt for insects for a science project.

“Sometimes it’s fun to play around and pretend to do something other than what we’re really doing,” she said. “It puts a little of the secret spy stuff into it.”

Event caches

Despite the players’ wariness around Muggles, the geocaching community is a friendly and welcoming one made up of a tight-knit group that enjoys swapping stories of their adventures. They sometimes hold “event caches,” which of course can only be found and attended by following GPS coordinates. They often take the form of a flash mob, and participation can be logged like any other cache.

On the evening of June 20, Heitman hosted an event cache in his own backyard as a farewell party before his departure to Afghanistan. Geocachers from across the region gathered to enjoy a potluck of pretzels and chips while lounging in folding lawn chairs.

Toward the end of the evening, a mystery cache showed up on the front door for Heitman. Inside an ammunition can the unknown benefactors stuffed crossword puzzles and games, bandannas and Gold Bond foot powder along with a cryptic note that read: “Your brethren of the north, Sir Knight, would have you know that while we chose to walk in solitude of shadows, we never walk alone. We’ll always be there with you.”

Although the relationships started through a virtual adventure, the friendships formed through geocaching are real.

“When we get together, we’re the best of friends, and we just have one common interest,” Heitman said. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that geocaching draws people with the same core values.”