Try Geocaching This Year – Fun For The Whole Family

My husband and I began Geocaching several years ago, continuing the tradition of celebrating our anniversary by trying something new.  Over 1,200 geocaching sites later we are still enjoying this fun activity.

There are more than 45,500 active Geocaching sites in British Columbia and many will be on the routes you travel and even in or near your campsite.  The coordinates for all of them can be obtained from the  geocaching website which also provides you with a map, description of the cache including its size, type of terrain, difficulty level, and logs of people who have looked for it before you. Often there is a hint to help you find it.  Download the app or purchase a dedicated GPS available online or at many retail outlets.

Caches can be as small as a square centimeter to the size of a large trunk.  All have a log and the larger ones usually have tradable items. You can take a tradable item from a cache if you replace it with something of equal or greater value. This adds a treasure hunt aspect to the “sport” which is especially appealing to kids.

People have created caches in ingenious places. A winter cache we were looking for was eluding us.  There was six inches of snow and I was poking around under a tree with a stick.  We finally gave up but when I was putting the stick back down I realized that the cache was hidden in a little hollow that had actually been carved into the stick!  We have found other caches hidden in a bird house, an electrical box, and the caps on the post of a chain link fence. We have found several hanging from the grates of a storm drain cover and several more in rocks which weren’t rocks at all but little containers made to look like rocks. One large cache was filled with about 100 film canisters.  There was a note saying that you couldn’t claim this cache unless you signed the log.  We spent a lot of time looking in the multitude of canisters before finding the log attached to the bottom of large container.  Another cache was at the bottom of a tall vertical tube. The only way you could get it was to fill the tube with water so the cache would float to the top but there was a drain hole near the bottom of the tube so you had to fill the tube faster than it drained.  Yet another cache required you to put a credit card in a little slot to trigger the opening mechanism.

Travel bugs, also called trackables, are another aspect of geocaching. You can pay as little as $5.00 for a stainless steel tag with a tracking number.  You attach the tracking number to a small item and put it in a geocache.  The managers of the site dedicate a special link for each travel bug.  You can see photos that people have taken of your trackable, read comments plus the travel route is plotted on a world map. My husband and I picked up a travel bug in a cache near our house and placed it in a cache near the Vancouver airport. While there we were joined by a stewardess who was also geocaching.  When she saw the travel bug she couldn’t believe her eyes – she had placed that very same travel bug in a cache in Singapore a couple of weeks before.

Geocaching has taken us to places we otherwise would never have visited. It often gives us an added incentive to go for a drive, walk, a hike or a bike ride.  If you haven’t tried it but would like to, visit the website and click on Geocaching 101.  Enjoy!

Interested in reading more on geocaching? Try Treasure Hunting in British Columbia’s Gold Country.

For places to camp in British Columbia go to the Camping Map at https://www.campingrvbc.com/

Share your BC camping and travel photos using hashtag #campinbc #explorebc

It’s always a great day to #Campinbc

Published: August 30th, 2017