Geocaching: Treasure hunting goes far, wide and high-tech

When the Royal Greenwich Observatory in England became the prime meridian for longitude, completing the gridding of the earth in 1884, it couldn't have glimpsed that in the 21st century, latitude and longitude measurements would spawn a worldwide game of hide-and-seek.

It's called geocaching.

Invented in 2000, geocaching revolves around the earth, with people taking part using handheld Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to locate hidden treasure.

Groundspeak, headquarters of the sport, calls it a "high-tech treasure-hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices."

Snohomish County is full of such "caches" — items hidden to the casual observer, but whose location has been logged at www.geocaching.com. Grab the location, program the GPS with the latitude and longitude, and roving satellites in the sky do their work, directing you to the treasure.

Cyclists whizzed past Janna Lajoie and her sons one day as they walked the Centennial Trail near Arlington. Her GPS was giving her the distance and the latitude and longitude of what they were searching for.

Suddenly, they left the trail for a brushy area on the right.

Lajoie stooped next to an overturned, hollowed tree stump, removed some mossy debris covering the opening and there was an ammunition can.

She opened it. It was filled with trinkets — key chains, Beanie Babies, a coffee mug, a set of earphones. She opened a zip-top plastic bag in the box and jotted down her name and what she and her sons were taking out, replacing them with a few other items. They closed the ammo box and carefully placed it in the hollow stump, covering it back up with bark and moss.

Small, inconspicuous caches are everywhere, unknown to most people. Rural, urban, it doesn't matter. It might be a magnet stuck under a park bench. Or something on the back of a street sign.

There's a cache at Seattle's Harbor Steps, and several near the Space Needle.

Geocachers get permission from the land manager or property owner to place a cache, "so we're not trampling through an environmentally sensitive area," said Laurie Freeman, president of the Washington State Geocaching Association (WSGA.).

"That's a misconception people have that we're out there digging up cemeteries and cutting holes in trees," said Freeman. "That's absolutely not what we do. We're very careful to respect the environment."

A favorite geocaching term is CITO, "cache in, trash out." The association operates year-round with this policy, and dedicates a CITO day each April to cleaning up parks and other locations.

The box needs to be labeled with an official sticker, or sometimes people use a stencil or write on it with a Sharpie. Inside are a couple of paragraphs explaining that this is a worldwide game.

Permission in parks is still on a case-by-case basis; the state's parks department has left it up to individual rangers, said Freeman. If caches are placed in state parks, the ranger has to approve the location, and there are strict guidelines as to what can be left in the cache.

You can't include food, firearms, perfume or anything that could attract animals, for example. In the woods, bears will rip apart an ammo box. You can put books, signature items associated with geoacachers, or even use the cache as a "Travel Bug hotel," a place where a Travel Bug (a registered trademark) or a geocoin can travel from place to place. Pick it up, note the engraved registry number and take it to another cache and log it there. Travel Bugs have been all over the world. Soldiers are even caching in Iraq.

To put a cache on www.geocaching.com, once you've selected a location and placed the cache, you submit it for review by local volunteers. If they feel it has been placed in an acceptable spot and is more than one-tenth of a mile from any other cache, they'll publish the cache and post it to the online network.

Lajoie's dashboard is loaded with geocache finds. On the back window of her van is a scarab symbol of travel bugs and her handle, Lajoie5. In one cache, the family found a ticket to Disney World.

Geocaching appeals to people who have a technical side — but it's also for people who love the outdoors. It's about hunting treasure — but you leave as much treasure as you take.

Freeman, who has found nearly 4,000 caches since she started four years ago, ran a Halloween event for the club called "Rest In Pieces." Freeman hid 100 fake bones of disassembled skeletons in a three- to four-mile radius of the Sedro-Woolley community center. People collected the bones and then reassembled the skeletons.

"I did let the Sedro-Woolley police know what was happening in case people got a glimpse of a skull," Freeman said.

When Freeman first started finding geocaches, "The attraction for me was finding something that was hidden, that everyday people didn't know about."

Now, however, "The thing that's attracting me more and more is the social or community aspect of it, having these events and getting people together from all different areas of the state," Freeman said.

As a 21st-century sport, geocaching is in its infancy, with rules and protocols still being invented. "It's still completely evolving," Freeman said. "There are new aspects and new parts of it. As the sport grows, our membership grows. From four to 10 people in the state, it's now in the hundreds of members and thousands of participants," she said.

"Our oldest member is 83, all the way down to toddlers. It's a fun way to see places in your own backyard you didn't maybe even know about," Freeman said.

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com