Caching In

It’s just after eight on a frigid Sunday morning, and I’m standing in an empty stretch of woods on the outskirts of Concord. A man I’ve met only once before is digging in the snow with a small shovel. He shovels in bursts, moving across a huge outcropping of rocks buried in snow, pushing it away from the cracks in the rock pile. I’d offer to help, but this man is focused, and I don’t want to distract him. Besides, there’s only one shovel.

I’m here because I made fun of golfers. It was a few months ago, during a holiday party, and I said something about how there’s nothing worse than golfers yammering about fades, fat shots and handicapped dog legs. Just as I reached the crescendo about what golfers and geldings have in common, a stranger tapped me on the shoulder. “You shouldn’t make fun of people’s passions,” he said. Before I could respond, he pulled out what looked like a cell phone and turned it on. “Like me. I have a passion. Ever heard of geocaching? This is my new GPS, and I use it to find caches. Here,” he said as he handed me the device. “See those things there? Those are caches, and we find them.”

The man from the party and the one now on all fours, elbow-deep in snow, is Mark Myers, a 49-year old pediatrician from Bedford and a rising star on the New Hampshire geocaching scene. “Let’s keep looking,” Mark says, in between furious attacks at the icy snow, “but I might have to call Gavin.” Gavin is another geocacher, a mentor of sorts to Mark. Mark pauses and then calls his friend. Gavin provides advice. “It’s right where you’d expect it,” he tells Mark. Mark says goodbye and starts digging again. Moments later he finds what we came for – our first cache of the day.

Geocaching is an outdoor sport that combines the use of a hand-held global positioning satellite receiver (GPS), a website that supplies coordinates, hints, tips and rules (www.geocaching.com), and a passion to find and hide caches all across the planet. The goal is to use your GPS and specific coordinates to find a cache, logging the find in a small notebook once you’ve located it. It’s a real-life, high-tech treasure hunt, except the treasure is finding the cache’s hidden spot, not necessarily in what you actually find. There are almost 800,000 caches logged worldwide with countless people like Mark dedicating their free time to hunting them down. Mark has found over 1,100 caches, and he plans on adding more today.

Every cache has a name, like “Turnabout is Fair Play,” and “A Cache Called Wanda,” and cachers download coordinates along with helpful tips, stats, and the degrees of the location’s difficulty and terrain. This one is called, “Power to the Cachers,” and we’re the eighty-second group of cachers to find and log it since it was hidden almost three years ago. Mark explains there’s a notation language cachers use. “TFTC” – Thanks For The Cache, and “TLNLSL” – Took Nothing, Left Nothing, Signed Log. BTW, I think, my friends would be ROTFL, OMG, if they could see me now out here. LOL!

As I watch Mark leave our names in the tiny notebook, I can’t ignore the fact that I’m a small man of Irish descent in the middle of nowhere looking for a box of lucky charms. I keep that reflection for myself because Mark is up and we’re ready to go. Before we move, I sneak a peak inside Mark’s backpack. He has a small shovel, doctor pliers, maps, pens, batteries, a flashlight, matches, a knife and who knows what else – everything but a tuna sandwich and today’s Racing Forum. To say that Mark is prepared would be an understatement. He’s even wearing gloves with his fingertips exposed so he can touch the GPS screen with ease.

Mark hands me his GPS. “Let’s go find the next one,” and he hustles past me, his cocoa brown dog, Sailor, running out ahead. Mark’s done his homework, explaining that there are four caches in and around these trails. We’re now looking for “My Fine Feathered Friends,” about half a mile away.

We walk along a trail towards a stone wall. Mark pulls up the clue on his GPS - “Behind the tree with a face – in a cavity in a wall of stone. Remember – you do NOT have to move any rocks!” I watch the distance drop from 500 feet to 200 feet as we snow shoe across the trail, and we spot the “face” - a gnarled knot on the tree that looks like one of those shrunken apple faces from third grade. Mark finds the cache right behind the tree, a camouflage-colored container crammed with a notebook, action figures, buttons, cards, pins and birds. He encourages me to take something, and I choose a parrot on a perch. Mark leaves something from his bag of tricks (“swag,” he calls it), he signs the log, we pack it all back up, hide the cache in its spot, and we’re off to the next one.

Geocachers are competitive. Mark mentions with pride the number of caches he’s found, and he speaks in reverent tones about some of New Hampshire’s leading geocachers, names like HockeyPuck, Chicken Lady, Me and My Dogs, Much Ado and Kayak Kouple. This Mount Rushmore of granite state geocachers has probably logged more than 15,000 caches in New Hampshire and elsewhere. Geocaching extends across the globe, from Switzerland to South Africa, from Hollis to Henniker - tens of thousands of people using hand-held GPS devices, a comfortable pair of shoes, competitive juices and a basic sense of direction. We’re an hour into the morning, and I lack all four of those requirements, but I’m having fun.

Mark, aka “Ponil,” explains the types of caches – regular ones, like the two we’ve found, puzzle caches that take some unraveling to decipher, virtual caches that require you to prove that you’ve seen something that can’t be moved, and multi-caches - a series of caches hidden in what can stretch for miles. There are nano-caches – small, magnetic capsules often hidden along street signs and guard rails - and bison tubes, small metal tubes hidden in trees and walls.

We press on, finding two more caches in these woods, one with the warning, “Please rehide well so the cache is not muggled.” Apparently there’s some sort of connection between Harry Potter, non-wizards and Tupperware containers hidden in the woods, but I don’t ask. For my money, anyone hoping to steal a well-hidden box of plastic monkeys and rubber rats should be called something other than muggle.

We reach the next spot, in the shadow of Sewalls Falls Bridge, and we find four more caches, including a virtual one. As we walk back from the final find, I start to wonder how this kind of thing could be marketed for the masses. We could make crazy tee shirts with slogans like, “Cache Me if You Can,” and “Cache but Don’t Carry!” Or maybe a TV reality show, “Dash for Cache,” where geocachers and muggles race against each other and the elements to find the true meaning of treasure and friendship.

I’m ready to call it a day, but Mark wants more. “It can be an obsession for some people, but not me,” he says, moments after describing his kayak trip on the Merrimack river two weeks ago (yes, in mid February) to find a middle leg of a multi-cache hidden by his caching cohorts. Paddling in a defenseless fiberglass watercraft in the middle of a swift, ice-strewn river may rank up there with what some consider obsessive behavior, but there’s no time to think because Mark’s got his GPS out and we’re heading to Penacook for more.

After ten minutes of driving, we find a nano-cache on the inside a traffic sign, the tiny scroll no wider than a baby’s finger, rolled up inside the capsule’s tip. We find another on the way back into town, causing a minor traffic jam in a cemetery on Fisherville Road. Mark tells me that police will often stop geocachers, which reminds me of Mark’s most important rule of geocaching. “Never geocache near a school during the school day.” I can imagine that conversation. “No, officer, really, I was just hunting for a small bucket of action figures. I didn’t even see the kids on the playground. Honest!”

We have one last cache to go – it’s now been more than four hours since we started, and I’m ready for a nap. But Mark keeps going, and now we’re on Commercial Street in Concord, staring at an enormous wall. “There’s a bison tube in the wall,” Mark tells me as he clears away snow with his feet and shovel. We try this for about ten minutes before giving up, the snow too deep to make much progress. I’m starting to slur my words I’m so tired, but Mark isn’t done. There are thousands more caches in New Hampshire for Mark to find, and hundreds of thousands across the globe waiting for him and his fellow treasure hunters. We shake hands, and as I drive off, I see Mark heading in the opposite direction, looking for just one more cache. I can’t do it – I’m all cached out. I’m strapped for cache. I’m cache-poor. Or maybe I’m just a muggle.