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According to the Georgia State Parks website, geocaching is rapidly becoming one of the most popular outdoor activities in Georgia State Parks, because it combines the high-tech feel of online games with the old-fashioned fun of a treasure hunt. State parks in the Northeast Georgia area include Tallulah Gorge, Black Rock Mountain, Moccasin Creek, Amicalola Falls, Unicoi and Smithgall Woods. Each has a state-park-sanctioned geocache, as well as geocaches placed by other users. The Dahlonega Gold Museum is the only state historic site in the area participating in the History Trail GeoTour. Gail MacMillan and John Carsello are a husband-and-wife geocaching team known as WeCacheALot. They split their time between Helen and Titusville, Fla., and they have found 2,313 geocaches. Both retired, they’ve been geocaching since July 2011. MacMillan said the Georgia State Park challenge was what got them started, and they have completed the challenge by finding geocaches in 42 parks all over the state. We camp near Unicoi State Park and would regularly hike the trails, she said. We kept seeing
The Mountain Traveler • Summer 2014
signs for ‘ Get Out, Get Fit, Get Dirty’ so one day we inquired and learned Unicoi would lend us a GPS. Our first find was the Unicoi State Park hide and we were hooked. Like Hopkins, MacMillan said geocaching gets us to places we would never know about, and, she said, it has introduced us to some of the finest people you could ever want to meet. Geocaching really is an amazing sport, she said. It challenges you on so many levels physically, emotionally at times, puzzlesolving abilities, intellectually, risk-taking, organizing, computer skills, creativity on and on. MacMillan said geocaching in the mountains of Georgia and the swamps of Florida have unique challenges. In Georgia, one is ever mindful of bear, snakes and other critters, she said. In Florida, we cache a lot in swamps and are mindful of alligators and snakes. Slogging through a foot or two of swamp water also requires stamina and endurance, especially on some of the longer hikes. I can’t say one is harder than the other; they’re just different terrains, each with its own unique demands.
MacMillan said their most memorable cache was one in Florida that required about 20 miles of hiking in the swamp in some pretty tough situations, puzzlesolving and kayaking to the finish. It is truly a masterpiece hide, she said. Lots of boo-boos along the way but no snake bites. Their most unusual, and at the time, scary, find in Georgia was a tidal dependent geocache on Skidaway Island State Park. Because of a mistake in calculations, they found themselves stuck in the quicksand-like muck on the bottom of Skidaway arrows. John was horribly stuck and out of breath from struggling to even lift one leg, she said. I was yelling at him to get out because we would drown when the tide came back in and it would start coming in soon. We pulled at anything we could to make a cover over the mud. Obviously we made it out all right, but there were some scary moments. Once we were safe and saw how we looked covered in mud, we just laughed and laughed. To find geocaches near you, see geocaching.com. For more information about the Georgia State Parks challenge, see gastateparks. org/ Geocaching. ■ An ammo box geocache hidden off the Short Line Trail at Tallulah Gorge State Park is unnoticeable unless you have the GPS coordinates and are specifically looking for it. The box contains a log book for finders to sign their name, as well as small toys and trinkets for finders to trade. Photo/ Kimberly Brown