Story originally printed in the Winona Daily News or online at www.winonadailynews.com

Published - Sunday, May 11, 2008

Mad for cache: Reporter’s adventure in geocaching yields fun — and a green plastic octopus

By Käri Knutson | Winona Daily News

You don’t get to go on many treasure hunts as an adult. That’s why I jumped at the chance to go geocaching with Liz Haywood.

Geocaching is kind of like a 21st century scavenger hunt, with people planting objects others try to find using global positioning systems. Latitude and longitude coordinates help provide direction.

Haywood helped plan the Hike & Seek Spring Festival at Lake Park Lodge on Saturday, which includes Dash for Cache, a chance for geocachers and geocaching newbies to have some fun hunting. The event is a fundraiser for the Women’s Resource Center of Winona. Haywood said it’s a reincarnation of Pedal and Play, the group’s former fundraiser.

“We want this to appeal to a wider part of the community,” Haywood said. “It’s amazing how many people are out there geocaching.”

Geocaching has been around for about eight years. To get started, you’re going to want to wear comfy shoes, clothes you don’t mind getting dirty, sunglasses, a pen, a token to leave behind and a global positioning device. You can buy them from $100 to $1,000. At Dash for Cache, they will be available to use for free during the event.

Haywood did her homework before our outing, visiting www.geocaching.com to find where caches have been stashed. She got the coordinates: N 44 degrees, 2.451, W 91 degrees, 38.706.

Yeah, those numbers didn’t mean a whole lot to me, either. Luckily, the GPS device knows where that’s at. The device is usually accurate to within 15 to 25 feet. Caches aren’t supposed to be buried, but rather are tucked.

We knew it was at East Lake, and the person who hid it indicated it was a nano, meaning small. There was also a hint provided after unscrambling some letters using a key: “Old school play time.”

While we looked, a blond-haired “muggle” Rollerbladed by, looking way too interested in what we were doing. Muggles are the people surrounding you who aren’t geocaching.

Haywood averted a muggle recently, telling the person she was looking for jewelry she had lost.

“You don’t want them to know what you’re doing,” she said.

We wandered around until the coordinates matched up. We saw a piece of playground equipment that seemed the likely home of our treasure. We looked high. We looked low. We looked nearby, thinking maybe the clue was too obvious.

Haywood warned that nanos can be really small. She once found a cache hidden in a magnetic key holder.

Patience is something a geocacher must have — and lots of time. We decided to move on to another cache and try our luck later with the school play time teaser.

Haywood let me try to find the next cache on my own since she had already found it in March. After a long walk, the coordinates were close. She helped me out by saying “warmer” and “colder” as I looked. Within minutes, I found a green thermos.

Inside was an array of items, including a rubber ducky and a green plastic octopus I claimed for treasure. Part of the geocaching ethic is to leave something behind. We left a tag that explained root production in trees. Quirky is good in the world of geocaching.

The coolest part was finding a little notebook filled with the dates other geocachers had found the same treasure. It was almost a year old. The cache had been visited often, only seeing a lull from Nov. 23 to March 16. No one signs their real names. Someone had been there March 21, noting that it was the first day of spring but Winona had gotten five inches of wet and heavy snow. Ugh. Another couple had found the cache on their 28th wedding anniversary.

Haywood signed for us and we were off. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to find our first treasure. Still, it was a satisfying first foray.

The treasure isn’t worth a whole lot monetarily. An orange crayon. A red heart pin. But that’s not why people such as Haywood go geocaching.

“It’s surprising how thrilling it is to find it,” Haywood said. “I like knowing someone’s been there.”

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