Stealth in a new environment…

Many, many years ago, when our country was still considered “new,” mapmakers, land-surveyors, engineers etc. needed a way to map and locate places to a very high level of accuracy. For this reason, they started to place objects called “benchmarks” throughout the country. Benchmarks are most commonly found to be metal disks usually marked with the date and logo of The Nation Spatial Reference System.

This is a pretty boring historical post so far, right? Wrong! I hate history…

In a nutshell, from this process a game called Geocaching was formed. Geocaching, in a nutshell, is a modern scavenger hunt where people who own GPS navigation will punch in the coordinates of a “cache” (or the hidden treasure) and go on a hunt to find it.

Easy right?

Wrong! These caches are planted by other lovers of the game who take it very seriously. This isn’t as simple as a child’s easter egg hunt. At times, caches can be near impossible to find though some will spend what seems like forever looking because, supposedly, the harder a cache is to find the bigger the prize in contains (i.e. I once had to go into a park, follow a trail into the woods, wander from the path onto a bridge, lower myself into a creek from a guard rail, walk along the creek until it split, then go into the island of land the splitting creek created, dig through a rotten tree stump, and pull out the cache which only contained a few marbles and some shells). Therefore, the game is very involved and can become very intense…and then I moved to New York…

Imagine doing all of this in suburbia, then moving it to a densely populated city where everyday civilians are just watching, lurking, and waiting to call the cops on people trespassing. Trust me when I say, most people won’t take pity on you intruding on their territory if you say “Hey, sorry, I’m just on a scavenger hunt.”

Maybe none of you will find this interesting, but it is truly an experience worth trying at least once (and because I suspect most college students don’t have GPS, I’ll add that you can do it without one). Visit the site (geocaching.com), and mabe even find a geocache or two lurking around Pratt…