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GeoDog By Whitney Wilde
Arrrrrr! Ay be Captain Woof—the pirate pooch searching for hidden treasure with me mateys! Come along on this adventure called geocaching: the modern “Find It!” game using a handheld GPS device to get location coordinates off a satellite. It is part treasure hunt, part outdoor adventure, part techno-geek, and all fun for pups and people. We discovered geocaching by accident. Hiking through the lush green forest, mom stopped to tie her shoe and noticed something odd, out of place: a metal box hidden in a hollow fallen tree. Hidden treasure! I expected scurvy dogs to come claim their pirate booty of gold doubloons and jewels. Mom bravely opened the box and found some stickers, AA batteries, and a plastic army man. Huh? Geocaching started in May 2000, when Dave Ulmer hid a plastic bucket of goodies (software, videos, books, food, money, and a slingshot) in Beavercreek, Oregon. He posted the coordinates in an online newsgroup and dared people to find the “stash.” Today, there are over two million caches worldwide.
Geo-lessons For our first treasure hunt, we accompanied veteran geocacher Rhonda Rocker and geo-dogs Cissy (Australian Cattle Dog) and Leila (Border Collie/ Chow). Rhonda explained to us “muggles" that our first step is to go to a website such as www. geocaching.com, to view a list of caches (nearest one first). They are rated for the difficulty to locate and difficulty of terrain (one star = easy; five stars = difficult). Geocaches come in a variety of flavors. A geocache contains at the minimum a logbook to sign. An event cache is a meeting of local geocachers, with the location discovered using GPS. Letterbox caches contain a rubber stamp that you stamp in your personal journal, and then use your own rubber stamp in the cache 36 | coastalcaninemag.com | Fall 2014