Geocaching: Local devotee has unearthed more than 10,000 little treasures

On a sunny afternoon at Seattle's Carkeek Park, Dave Baumchen appears to have his mind set on getting to know each and every one of the gnarled, nearly 120-year-old fruit and nut trees at Piper's Orchard.

He approaches each tree, one after the other, eyeing it from all angles while running his hands over its lumpy limbs, poking his fingers in various holes and crevices, and patting down its trunk like a cop patting down a suspect.

"There're lots of little hidey holes here," says Baumchen, a 63-year-old Camano Island retiree.

Every so often, Baumchen consults his handheld GPS unit — the Garmin GPSmap 60CSx (that's the one with color screen) — while bending low to search under one of the bizarre-looking trunks that grow parallel along the ground, or getting up on tiptoe to scan the higher branches.

"I know where it is, but I'll resist the temptation to tell you and spoil it for you," says an onlooking Don Ricks, who happens to be here trimming branches for the parks department.

After about 15 minutes Baumchen finds what he's looking for: a black paintball canister that's been placed in — skip this sentence if you don't want to know — a hole in one of the tree trunks and covered with a piece of bark. Opening the canister, Baumchen finds some stickers, a pen, a whistle and various plastic trinkets and assorted tchotchkes.

Baumchen is geocaching (say "GEE-oh-cashing"), that high-tech treasure-hunt slash hide-and-seek sport wherein participants use GPS devices to zero in on caches that have been stashed by fellow geocachers. Caches can be anywhere — in the woods, at the top of a mountain, underwater in the middle of a lake, under a park bench near a busy downtown intersection, or in a hole in a tree trunk in a lovely city park setting such as this.

A booming activity

When seekers find a geocache the protocol is to trade one item from the cache for one that the geocacher has brought, sign the log and then re-hide it for the next seeker. Since it started nine years ago near Portland, geocaching has become a worldwide phenomenon; as of press time, there were nearly 775,000 caches in more than 100 countries.

Baumchen, who was bitten by the geocaching bug about four years ago, has found more than a few of them himself. In fact, this Piper's Orchard geocache is number 10,126 for Baumchen. He's the first person from Washington to go over the 10,000 mark, according to data kept on geocaching.com, the sport's Web-based "headquarters" and all-encompassing resource.

(Some other number-based factoids from Baumchen's profile on geocaching.com: He's found as many as 79 geocaches in one day, 125 over a weekend, 655 in a single month, and has cached in 11 states and nine different countries.)

"Geocaching gets you outside to beautiful places," says Baumchen, describing what attracted him to the sport. "It combines the high-tech with hiking, which are two things I love."

Plus, you learn stuff. For instance, this Piper's Orchard cache is what's known as a multi-cache, meaning that to get the GPS coordinates where we'd find the goods, we first had to figure something out. In this case, after reading a sign detailing the orchard's history, we answered a series of questions. (For example, Q: How many orchard trees survived the fire of 1889? A: 32.) These answers corresponded to letters that we used in simple arithmetic problems to determine the cache's longitude and latitude. That got us about two-thirds of the way up the hillside orchard and from there it was a matter of Baumchen checking every nook and cranny until he could check off number 10,126.

Cachers get creative

Geocaches range from straightforward and traditional — i.e., a waterproof container placed in a hole and then covered with twigs — to some that are mind-bogglingly creative. One called Queen of the Night, near Bellingham, can only be found at night. When geocachers arrive at coordinates found on geocaching.com, they find a container with a laser flashlight inside. When the flashlight is placed inside a holder on a nearby tree, its beam points to another tree with its own flashlight holder which, when the flashlight is placed inside it, points to another tree. And so on, for about 10 trees, until the last beam points to the destination cache.

Radio Days, in Skagit County, leads geocachers to a location where they're instructed to dial their car radio to a certain frequency. After a few moments a short-wave radio broadcast delivers the coordinates for the goal cache.

"I like the really creative ones," says Baumchen, who himself is renowned in geocaching circles for stashing complex and thought-provoking caches.

"He's well-known for devious, sneaky and well-camouflaged caches," says Bellingham's Theresa Wines, a geocacher for three years. "And for his tough puzzles, too."

Traveling treasure

Back at the orchard, Baumchen fills out the log leaving his geocaching name (Rey del Roble, the name of a racehorse he once owned) and the date. (The cache is called Piper Homestead Orchard.) But instead of taking an item, he leaves a Travel Bug, a numbered tag attached to a little tiki figurine that he'll be able to track via reports filed by its finders on geocaching.com. Also attached is a small card on which the following message is printed:

"We would like the Rey del Roble Tiki King to travel around the world to encourage others to try and find 10,000 caches."

The next geocacher who finds this cache might take Baumchen's Travel Bug and place it a geocache in Discovery Park, or Olympia, or Florida — or just about anywhere.

"I had one that went to the Midwest, then all the way to Egypt, and now it's back in the Midwest again," Baumchen tells me.

In little more than an hour, Baumchen and I find three caches including a decidedly old-school one (Carkeek Cache) from 2001. Just the 33rd geocache ever stashed, the green ammo box stuffed in a hole in a tree stump was still going strong, its logbook detailing its repeated recent finds.

After a couple hours, I say goodbye to Baumchen, who tells me he's going to stay at the park to cache for a few more hours. Geocaching.com lists 13 at Carkeek Park, a few of which he's yet to find. No doubt he will. And I wouldn't bet against him finding those 765,000 others around the world, either.

Mike McQuaide is a Bellingham freelance writer and author of "Day Hike! Central Cascades" and "Day Hike! North Cascades" (Sasquatch Books). He can be reached at mikemcquaide@comcast.net. Blog: mcqview.blogspot.com.