Your phone beeps, and you pull up short to survey your surroundings. To the untrained eye, there’s nothing extraordinary about the alley you’re in, unassumingly located behind a small ice cream shop. You know better: you’ve followed the trail, and the object you’re seeking is close. After a few minutes of searching, you grin as you suddenly spy a small grey box magnetically attached to the underside of a guardrail. Jackpot.
Welcome to geocaching.
Straddling the line between nature walk and treasure hunt, between group subculture and solitary pastime, geocaching is an outdoor hobby in which participants use GPS-enabled devices to locate caches placed inconspicuously by other players all over the world. With more than 2.5 million caches scattered worldwide and more than 6 million active members, the activity has quickly gained popularity since its inception near Portland, Oregon, in May 2000.
Within the past five years, geocaching has taken off in Hillsdale County, with over 750 caches within 25 miles of the area according to official website Geocaching.com. Recently, Hillsdale College students are starting to join in too.
“It’s like a social treasure hunt,” junior Meg Prom said. “If Facebook and pirates were combined, you’d have geocaching.”
Freshman Randi Block was more succinct: “It’s just hiking with prizes.”
The rules of the hunt are simple. After deciding online which cache to pursue, the geocacher enters its coordinates into a GPS or smartphone, which allows him to pinpoint its location within an area of about thirty feet. Once there, he must rely on verbal or visual clues to locate the cache itself, which can range from tiny (a film canister) to much larger (a five-gallon bucket).
The contents vary from cache to cache, but most contain a log of past successful finders, as well as assorted objects which others have left behind.
“The rule is that if you take anything out of the cache, you’ve got to replace it with something of equal or greater value,” Prom said. “In that way you connect with people and their stories; it really connects you to the history of that particular spot.”
As subcultures go, geocaching is unusually pervasive. Many caches are squirreled away in sparsely trodden areas like parks and forests, but many more lurk unobtrusively in the spaces where we live out our everyday lives. According to Geocaching.com, there are 20 caches hidden less than a mile from Central Hall: in the Oak Grove Cemetery, on Baw Beese Trail, in Slayton Arboretum, and even in downtown Hillsdale.
“There are more in the county than one might suspect,” said local resident and longtime cacher Trinity Bird. “There’s a really challenging one by the courthouse with a code you have to figure out.”
Thus, in addition to the difficulty of finding the cache in the first place, cachers face the added challenge of opening it without passersby noticing. The community calls these unaware bystanders “muggles,” an affectionate term that speaks to the hobby’s burgeoning popularity alongside “Harry Potter” in the early 2000s.
Despite the inherently secretive and technological nature of the pastime, cachers still share the unique bond common to less virtual communities. To facilitate these ties, Geocaching.com sponsors regular meetups and extracurricular events.
“On average, we host around 40-50 events a month around the state,” said Kenneth Todd, an Allen resident and serious cacher who volunteers for Geocaching.com. “We get together for a meal, go out for a kayak ride, work on a park clean-up, or spend a day running around the trails, whether by hiking, driving, or offroading.”
Nor is the fellowship limited to officially sponsored events.
“Almost every single time we go we run into someone else also looking for the cache,” Prom said. “It encourages face-to-face meetings, because you’re actively going and doing stuff and giving each other advice. You’re going in search of something — you become a team.”
Of course, a niche like geocaching isn’t for everyone.
“I think it’s kind of one of those things you either love or you hate,” Prom said. “A lot of people kind of look at you as a little weird for doing it, because you’re walking out in the middle of a park for hours looking for this thing with your phone out. It’s kind of like the guy with the metal detector at the beach; no one talks to that guy, unless you’re a collector too and you’ve found your little niche.”
But, for many, the sense of belonging to a community united by an offbeat passion is part of the joy.
“The community for me sets us apart from other activities,” Todd said. “Most of us knew nothing of each other five years ago, but we consider each other great friends now. Anywhere we travel, we can hook up with other cachers, ask for advice.”
For their part, Hillsdale’s student geocachers are just getting started.
“If you were ever that kid who loved searching for clues or exploring the woods and finding old forgotten tales, then it’s worth it at the end,” Prom said. “There’s a sense of accomplishment in it, in following coordinates and hints to find somebody’s lost treasures.”
