Photos by ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News
Judy Woods, left, and Patty Kilson pause to refer to a GPS unit as they make their way to a cache along a Kincaid Park bluff during a geocaching class in late April.
Satellite sleuths are playing on a global game board
Geocachers use GPS to find treasure troves in a high-tech hunt
Published: May 22, 2006
Last Modified: June 13, 2006 at 03:28 AM
Boots crunched over old snow, thudded against wood planks of a derelict military train bed, then sank into mud as the hikers ascended a final incline.
"What we're going to see when we get up here is breathtaking," said Wes Skinner, with a backward glance at the dozen or so following him into the depths of Kincaid Park.
"Seriously," Skinner said. "It's a million-dollar view."
But no one looked at the view. They did not pause to take in the bare spruce trees, or the bald eagle overhead, or the flock of geese to the north. Instead, the hikers stared at cell phone-sized gadgets in their hands: GPS devices, directing them to the end of a treasure hunt.
These are geocachers. And the globe is their game board.
Geocaching is relatively new, made possible by the demilitarization of GPS satellites May 1, 2000. With that, anyone with a personal GPS can enter coordinates and get within 30 feet or so of any location.
To most people, so what? But to the hybrid gadget geek and outdoors freak, it meant game on. In fact, just two days later, on May 3, 2000, an Oregon man stuck a bucket of trinkets in the woods outside Portland -- a "cache," if you will. He left a logbook and posted the coordinates online.
He told people to find his hidden container, sign the logbook, take something but leave something too. People did. Then they planted their own caches with goodies and logbooks and posted those coordinates online also. And even more people trolled for those troves.
And the whole thing just took off and spread and, of course, reached Alaska.
Geocaching mania in Alaska today is a blossoming branch of a quirky hobby that's ever-growing Outside. Across the state, in wilderness areas, parks and downtown cores, geocachers hunt weather-proof military-style ammo cans that are about the size of a shoebox. Some caches are much smaller, magnets as tiny as thimbles.
Caches are stashed throughout Anchorage and in the Chugach National Forest -- at least 400 of them showing up on the main geocaching Web site. There are about 120 listed around Fairbanks, and nearly 50 in the Juneau area. And that's not counting those in Alaska's more far-flung regions.
Cruise ship and ferry passengers seek caches in the tiny towns of Southeast Alaska. Skinner knows a guy who planted shoreline caches during a kayak trip out of Seward. There is at least one in Deadhorse, some on the North Slope. One outside Nome is rumored to be the hardest to reach in Alaska, maybe anywhere; no one's reached it except the guy who put it there.
"This game's also a lot about viewpoints and vistas and the journey there," Skinner said. "It's puzzles, urban micros. It's a game -- and there's a dozen different ways to play it. And the places you go, it's stuff you would never find unless you were playing this game because it's the hidden Anchorage. That's the fun part of it."
Anchorage Parks and Recreation sensed the trend and offered a class on geocaching starting in April. Skinner jumped in to help. By day, he works for Warning Lites of Alaska. In his off time, he's a geocaching fanatic.
He first learned about "the game" when his daughter got a geocaching homework assignment and needed help using the GPS.
"I was hooked," Skinner said.
Truly: To date, he's found some 500 caches.
John Scoblic, a retired Army man, has discovered about 250, and planted many, too.
"I thought 'Aha! Something I can do with my GPS,' " Scoblic said. "And I'm a walking fiend. So it's turned out to be tremendous exercise."
Great exercise and excellent views are some of geocaching's selling points, reasons cited by rookies at Kincaid Park on a recent spring evening to tromp behind Skinner and Scoblic on a mostly uphill hike, GPS gadgets in hand.
Many wear sturdy-soled rubber boots, handy for the uphill trudge that leads to a bluff more than 130 feet above the shoreline, known as Serenity View. The group temporarily abandons its mission to absorb the scene: A wooden bench with a gracefully arced back faces Turnagain Arm. To the north, the city skyline. To the east, the Chugach Mountains jut like animal teeth.
"The first time I came out here, I was just dumbfounded," Skinner said. "Few people know about this place."
This is as close as their GPS gets them to their quarry. The cache hunkers somewhere nearby. The search is on. The hunters thread up faint trails, peering in all directions, crouching, craning, until 44-year-old Patty Kilson shouts, "I found it!"
The olive-green ammo can nestles below a snarl of dried brush and grass.
You could walk by and miss it.
But a good geocacher wouldn't, Scoblic said.
"When you first start out, it's easy to become confused and frustrated," he said. "Like a pilot, you've got to trust your instincts. The more you find, the more you know how to find them.
"And you're always looking for a place to put another one."
Kris Schrader, 41, first experienced geocaching with the class just days before.
"Since then, I've found three around town. I have a dog and it puts a new twist on taking the dog for a walk," he said.
As luck would have it, Schrader said, one cache was even stuffed with dog toys.
A cache holds at least a logbook the finder signs. Most contain a jumble of toys and treats -- swag, the cachers call it.
Other trinkets are called "travel bugs," tagged and marked with instructions: Log the bug's location online, then plant it in another cache elsewhere. Some have additional directions -- to add a bauble to it, or take its picture and post it on the Web.
People who hide caches are supposed to tend to them now and then -- make sure they aren't swiped, vandalized or otherwise damaged. That doesn't always happen, said geocacher Mike Malvick.
Exhibit A: He brought a new ammo can to Kincaid to replace a neglected cache nearby -- a rotting laundry basket planted by some teenagers.
Tonight's swag includes an envelope-sized emergency rain poncho, golf balls and a compass he scored from a cache on the Appalachian Trail.
There is also a travel bug key ring of plastic bracelets, like the yellow LiveStrong bands popularized by cyclist Lance Armstrong.
"We're clearly not normal," said Malvick, an Alyeska Pipeline engineer by day. And an Alaska geocacher at heart.
Daily News reporter Katie Pesznecker can be reached at kpesznecker@adn.com.
