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Community Corner

Geocachers Find Hidden Treasures Around Dearborn and Beyond

All you need to become a high-tech treasure hunter is a GPS app and a sense of adventure.

It’s a worldwide, high-tech treasure hunt—and it’s in your town.

Geocaching is an outdoor game of hide and seek using GPS receivers—the kind most smartphones have. To get started, you sign up on the Groundspeak Inc. website (which is free) and then type in the area where you’d like to start your first search. Up pops a big, fat list of hidden caches with hints and GPS coordinates. It helps if you add a free application—c:geo—to your phone.

On the website or via the phone app, you’ll get driving directions, maps, GPS coordinates and hints to help you find your first cache. You’ll also get comments from seekers who have gone before you and those can be truly helpful.

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Chris Kennard, 29, a full-time fine arts student at , got started geocaching after he read an article in a magazine about it. That was two years ago. Now he and his girlfriend, Carly Frederick, have found about 60 different caches, all in southeast Michigan.

There are hundreds of geocaches right near Dearborn.

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Eliza Neuman (full disclosure—she is the daughter of the author of this story) of Wyandotte is a 34-year-old Navy wife. She first heard about geocaching last year from another Navy wife.

“It piqued my interest enough to research it online, and I was immediately so, so interested, especially since there was a cache in a park about a quarter of a mile from my apartment.”

She was living then in the Seattle, WA area.

“I was immediately hooked when I found the first one,” she said.

Kennard, too, says he’s completely hooked on the sport.

“It’s exciting,” he said. “It’s like a treasure hunt. We like a lot of the woodsy ones. The hunt takes you to a lot of cool places you never would have gone to before.”

Caching In on Nature

When you find a cache—a hidden container from the size of a bolt to the size of a, well, a treasure chest—you open it to see what’s inside. Included in the cache items will be a log to sign, letting other seekers know about your experience.

“You can see how many have been there before you in this place that you didn’t even know was there before,” Kennard said.

He and his girlfriend and Neuman and her husband, David, said they often geocache with their dogs along. Many caches are hidden in parks and natural areas, but urban caches also abound.

“I love that geocaching is like a subculture,” Neuman said. “I feel like I’m part of something really cool and something exciting. It’s also very ‘green.’ The activity involves protecting the Earth and appreciating wildlife and natural environments. And I love that it’s something anyone can do. And the idea that it’s exercise and entertainment combined really strongly appeals to me.”

Kennard agreed.

“It’s cache in, trash out,” he said. “If you see trash, you pick it up.”

Groundspeak Inc., located in Seattle, is the headquarters of geocaching. The company was founded in 2000 to manage the growing sport of geocaching and today lists more than 1.5 million active caches all over the world, including three in Antarctica. There’s even one on the international space station. Yes, at least one astronaut is a geocacher.

“I get a weekly newsletter from Groundspeak and it says what are the latest caches in my area,” Kennard said.

His favorite find so far has been a “multi-cache” placed along the Lower Rouge River Recreation Trail in Canton.

“There are 10 of them, and each one you find gives you a clue for another one,” Kennard said. “With every one you find, you’re building up to the grand finale.”

Caches Vary by Difficulty

Caches listed on the website are rated on the difficulty of the “find” and also on the difficulty of the terrain. They range from very easy to seriously tough going.

Kennard and Neuman both said they’ve occasionally come away from a search empty-handed.

"Some people can just be totally evil when they’re hiding them,” Kennard said with a laugh.

Neuman said her favorite find was a great challenge.

“It was a night cache that you could only find with flashlights,” she said. “The path was guided by light-reflective tacks pushed into trees. It was about a four-mile hike, round trip. The cache itself was pretty difficult to find. It was really cold, really wet and really muddy, but it was just incredibly rewarding to do. The difficulty of the hunt made the find that much more rewarding.”

“Micro” caches can be particularly challenging, as well.

David Neuman has found two caches stashed away in magnetized containers disguised as bolts, and Kennard told of one micro cache he found shoved into a hole in a cement parking bumper in a parking lot.

Neuman said her friends, when they hear about her passion for geocaching, think it’s either “really cool or really stupid.”

Kennard said his friends who don’t geocache (those people are called “muggles,” by the way) see the “intrigue” of the sport, but “they don’t want to go out and get cold and muddy.”

Neither Neuman nor Kennard to date has hidden a cache.

“The rules state that you have to be able to maintain them, and I move a lot,” Neuman said.

Kennard plans to create and hide one this winter, he said.

“I’ve been hitting thrift stores and trying to find interesting containers,” he said.

Caches That Travel

Neuman and her husband have purchased five different “travel bugs, ” which are small metal tags embossed with bar codes to make them trackable. Attach a travel bug to an item and it becomes a “hitchhiker” — something taken from one cache by a seeker and deposited in another. Owners of “travel bugs” (which cost about $5 each) can follow online their progress across the globe.

One of Neuman’s travel bugs is attached to a keychain-sized “time turner” from the Harry Potter books.  Her message about it online is that she’d ultimately like to see it end up in London, England, and then returned to Wyandotte. It was first hidden in Washington state. Now it is in Florida, and, according to an online message from the last geocacher who found it, is on its way to London. She’s thrilled.

Neuman and her husband, when he was on leave from the Navy, visited Wyandotte last month and brought with them a travel bug they had found in Seattle. Attached to it is a small laminated card in memory of Pvt. 1st Class David Armstrong, an Army man from Ohio who made the “ultimate sacrifice” in 2007. The couple moved the “hitchhiker” to a respectful military hiding spot (called “Supreme Sacrifice” on the website) in Wyandotte, moving it 1,930 miles.

Tracking the bug online, they saw that it has since been moved several times, and is still in Michigan. It started traveling in 2007 in Ohio. Messages to the man who hid it in the first place are online, and also are respectful of the Army man’s memory.

“I love that when I find a geocache, it connects me to random people and that I can connect with them,” Neuman said.

Getting started as a geocacher is pretty easy if you have a smart phone.

“Go to geocaching.com and watch the how-to videos,” Neuman said. “They will lay out pretty much in plain English whether this is something for you or not. But frankly, if you’re not an outdoorsy person, this is not for you.”

“Once you have a geocaching account (free on the website) and you have the apps (on your phone), it’s pretty easy,” Kennard said.

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