Thrill-seekers engage in geocaching sport
Brandon Call
Issue date: 7/7/08 Section: Culture
It's a modern-day treasure hunt, minus the treasure.
There are no pirates, eye patches or X's on a map.
Instead, thrill-seekers use Global Positioning Systems to find small trinkets left behind by others who have found the items, called caches, and logged their experience on the Internet.
"It's actually pretty entertaining," said Victor Moreno, who goes by username VMAdventure2 and has logged more than 50 caches around the Albuquerque area. "Some of the hidden items can be hard to find, but that's exactly the fun of it. I can usually find at least two or three a day."
The sport of geocaching has taken off since the government ended selective availability eight years ago, which was put in place by the U.S. military to obscure GPS signals to prevent other nations from pointing nuclear missiles at the United States.
Players in more than 200 countries participate worldwide.
But not everyone has caught on to the phenomenon, Moreno said.
"When you're looking for a cache, it's sort of a CIA covert operation," he said. "You can't let the Muggles find the cache. They don't know the significance of a cache. They might just throw it away."
A Muggle? That's right, as in Muggles from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, meaning non-magical people.
"In geocaching terms, a Muggle is someone who doesn't know what geocaching is all about," Moreno said. "You aren't de-Mugglized until you find your first cache."
Armed with a cell phone with GPS capabilities and a Google map, I set out for Santa Fe to do some geocaching.
My first stop was the San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church structure in the United States. After some technical problems and some snooping around, I found the cache about 15 feet from the coordinates listed online.
The cache was particularly difficult with all the tourist traffic in the area. Alas, the fanny-pack-wearing, expensive-camera-aiming sightseers relented, and I finally made my cache.
There are no pirates, eye patches or X's on a map.
Instead, thrill-seekers use Global Positioning Systems to find small trinkets left behind by others who have found the items, called caches, and logged their experience on the Internet.
"It's actually pretty entertaining," said Victor Moreno, who goes by username VMAdventure2 and has logged more than 50 caches around the Albuquerque area. "Some of the hidden items can be hard to find, but that's exactly the fun of it. I can usually find at least two or three a day."
The sport of geocaching has taken off since the government ended selective availability eight years ago, which was put in place by the U.S. military to obscure GPS signals to prevent other nations from pointing nuclear missiles at the United States.
Players in more than 200 countries participate worldwide.
But not everyone has caught on to the phenomenon, Moreno said.
"When you're looking for a cache, it's sort of a CIA covert operation," he said. "You can't let the Muggles find the cache. They don't know the significance of a cache. They might just throw it away."
A Muggle? That's right, as in Muggles from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, meaning non-magical people.
"In geocaching terms, a Muggle is someone who doesn't know what geocaching is all about," Moreno said. "You aren't de-Mugglized until you find your first cache."
Armed with a cell phone with GPS capabilities and a Google map, I set out for Santa Fe to do some geocaching.
My first stop was the San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church structure in the United States. After some technical problems and some snooping around, I found the cache about 15 feet from the coordinates listed online.
The cache was particularly difficult with all the tourist traffic in the area. Alas, the fanny-pack-wearing, expensive-camera-aiming sightseers relented, and I finally made my cache.
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