• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 914 0

A puzzle cache is suggested by a tantalizing blue question mark on the Geocaching.com maps, because it’s the only type of geocache that doesn’t come with a latitude and longitude. Instead, would-be finders must outwit some kind of diabolical puzzle—crack a code or answer an un-Google-able quiz or riddle—to decipher the correct coordinates. With its high per capita density of software engineers and other pasty computer types, Seattle is a hotbed for this kind of cache, and soon I’m hooked. No matter how esoteric the subject—backgammon, twentieth-century earthquakes, Chinese characters—I’m willing to dive into it for a “smiley.” One cache requires me to master the matrix that transforms the RGB colors on my computer monitor into the YIQ system used by color TVs. For another, I have to calculate the “geographic centroid” of Seattle—the point at which you could balance the city on the head of a sufficiently sturdy pin. At one low point, I even rent the Uma Thurman movie Prime in order to derive a set of coordinates from the MPAA registration number at the end of its credits. I feel a vague kinship with extreme-caching daredevils whenever I find one of these caches—I may not have rappelled down a sheer cliff face, but I did have to face some grueling ordeal, whether it was matrix algebra or a lousy Uma Thurman rom-com. Signing each log, it feels as though I’ve accomplished something.

Extreme cachers and puzzle cachers might take hours or even days to notch a single geocache; they prize quality over quantity. Power cachers, on the other hand, are the bottomless gourmands of the geocaching world. Their dictum is to cache as much as possible for as long as possible. On September 27, 2010, a two-person team from Malibu calling themselves “ventura_kids” set a new world record by finding 1,157 caches in a single day.* Do the math: that’s a new cache every minute and fifteen seconds . . . for twenty-four hours. By comparison, Dylan and I spent more than an hour finding that BMX cache, and that was just a stone’s throw from our front yard. The key to this kind of brutal efficiency is planning. The ventura_kids’ entire route was charted in advance, in an area with no traffic or stoplights. Their Jeep was stocked for any eventuality, including ten gallons of gas and headlamps for each cacher. At each stop, team members would scramble like a pit crew, typically uncovering the cache before the driver even had his GPS device unmounted from the dashboard. (They used preprinted stickers instead of signing in ink, which saved precious seconds.) “Pace yourselves,” Steve O’Gara of ventura_kids advised anyone on the Geocaching.com forums who might want to follow in his team’s footsteps. “Try not to get any injuries near the beginning. Keep drinking water. Stop for a picture now and then. Watch out for scorpions, and cactus.”

Even so, this amazing marathon was possible only because of the venue chosen: rural roads in the high desert of south-central Nevada. Many of these highways are “power trails,” in which easy-to-find cache containers have been placed every 528 feet (by Geocaching.com rules, no two caches may be closer to each other than a tenth of a mile) along the side of a road, usually at the bases of electrical poles. Why leave a trail of geocaches along an ugly highway, rather than in some scenic nature spot? To encourage feats of speed like this one, of course.

Cache proliferation: fifty square miles east of Denver, with its Malthusian swarm of little geocache icons placed along “power trails”

The artificial abundance of a million-geocache world has soured some old-school cachers on the game. Originally, the rarity of geo-caches was part of their allure; you had to venture to a remote mountaintop or deserted beach to find one. By definition, how can it be special anymore to find something so ubiquitous? Purists call the new glut of low-quality caches “micro-spew,” and heap scorn on their most typical delivery system, the 35-millimeter film canister. “Film canisters are to geocaching what spam is to e-mail,” they will tell you, or