Thrifty Thurston Hunts For Olympia Geocaches

olympia geocache
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By Eric Sims-Brown

SCJ alliance logoA sunny day in early July.  James, Holmes, Devin and I set out, four intrepid explorers braving the semi-wild of the Huff n Puff Trail in Shelton.  We are on a quest for buried treasure.  The boys wonder aloud about what we might find.  Their speculations run the gambit from gold to candy.  They argue about the merits of each.  In the end they decide gold will buy more candy.

olympia geocache
(From left) Holmes Waltermeire, James Farr, and Devin Fuestin successfully locate a geocache.

We slog through thick underbrush.  Blackberry vines take swipes at our bare legs.  James says we’re close.  The other boys moan.  We’ve been close for the last ten minutes.  The coordinates are annoyingly inconsistent.  At one point we’re within a few inches and then we’re several feet from our riches.  The canopy of green, the trees and bushes are presents on Christmas Eve.

Holmes and Devon reach a point of mutiny.  Candy is much easier to find at the store.  At that moment James stops.  The compass on my phone indicates our prize is right here under our feet.  There’s a scramble to be first,  a chaos of hands, leaves and logs.  Then, there it is, lodged in the bottom of a stump – the geocache.

There are thousands of geocaches in Shelton and Olympia according to geocaching.com. A geocache is a container.  Inside there can be just about anything.  Our geocache contained a Pokemon card, a plastic coin, a pacifier and a notebook among other things.  I flipped open the book to find a list of names going back five years.  We added ours to the list and swapped goods.

That’s the idea.  Take something out, put something in and return the geocache back in the same spot.

“The best part of caching is the adventure,” says 62-year-old Kent resident Wayne Heath.  Heath and his wife Dianne are avid cachers.  They’ve found a geocache in all 39 Washington counties, 17 states and one in Mexico.  The retiree says geocaching lets you see “a lot of areas that you would not normally see by doing the touristy things.”

Getting started is easy.  I downloaded an app for my phone.  The app had everything including a list of geocaches and specific hints about where to find them.

The difficult part is actually finding the geocache.  My wife and I failed multiple times.  The most recent attempt led us on a trek through a previously unknown section of Yauger Park.  We stumbled upon empty beer cans, sleeping bags and a grocery cart from Safeway.

olympia geocache
A geocache can be located anywhere, like this one found locally in a stump.

“Some are real easy in that they are just a plastic box covered with a few leaves,” says Heath.  “Others are more creative.  We found one that was in a bird house.  But what made it really unique was that there was a motion detector attached to the bird house so that when someone came close it started chirping.”

Of course someone has to hide all of these geocaches.

Heath and his wife don’t own any caches but they do have a Travel Bug.  A Travel Bug is an object that is moved from cache to cache.  The purpose is to see where it goes.  The item is tracked online through logs posted on the geocaching.com website.  Says Heath, “I have found bugs that started in Germany and Africa.”  Heath’s Travel Bug – an old Washington State Sales Tax Token – has been to Hawaii and is currently in Massachusetts.

There is something to geocaching.  One cannot help but feel like a kid.  Who cares what’s in the geocache?  The thrill is in the renewal of mystery.  Possibility is everywhere.  Secrets hiding underneath park benches or down alleys.  Long forgotten nooks and crannies just waiting for curiosity.

 

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