Hidden treasures: Get outdoors with geocaching

Thanks to technology, treasure hunting is back. 

It’s called geocaching now, and Chris Stevenson, a 26-year-old Ontario native, has unearthed bounty just beyond the Cathedral on Schenley Park’s grounds. 

“I’ve always had that ‘explorer’s itch’ but never really had a reason to,” Stevenson said, as he explained his reasoning for getting involved with geocaching. 

Geocaching is an outdoor, virtual scavenger hunt that requires the use of GPS-enabled devices, according to Pitt’s Student Affairs website. A geocacher navigates to a specific set of GPS coordinates and attempts to find the geocache — or container with a visitor’s log and occasionally a reward — hidden at a specific location. A geocacher can search for cache coordinates by entering the location of where they want to explore on the geocaching official website, www.geocaching.com.

There are more than two million “active geocaches” worldwide, according to the website, and six million people geocaching.  

Interested users only need a GPS-enabled device or smartphone to navigate to a hidden cache, which makes geocaching an easy way to explore the outdoors. Geocachers can then log their findings in a community-based log book.

Stevenson said geocaching has brought him to unexpected places. He has gone to the stadium ruins at Pompeii, and for his fourth anniversary of geocaching, he took a midnight trip to the top of the Empire State Building. 

“I got into geocaching four years ago, sort of out of boredom,” Stevenson said. “I found out about it online and just ran with it.” 

Stevenson said he has done over 114 geocache events, and he has become especially close with different cachers — he even attended a fellow cacher’s wedding. His adventures have taken him to far-off lands, but he said his time hunting in Pittsburgh has been “pretty awesome,” too. 

“I managed to get a cache near the top of the incline railway, which was a must-do for me,” Stevenson said. 

The boom in GPS technology in 2000 gave the virtual recreational activity its start, according to its official website. Dave Ulmer, who organized the first-ever, satellite-based locational hunt in 2000, originally called it the “Great American GPS Stash Hunt.” The hunt evolved into what is known as geocaching today. 

“It’s all about finding something, sometimes in the city and sometimes not,” said Amy Tiernan, a junior studying art history and history. 

Caches can be virtually any item, from clear plastic containers to fake rocks with secret compartments. For some geocachers, it is a hobby that allows them to be active and creative. 

“I found out about geocaching while on vacation on the shores of Lake Erie,” Corey Koch, a 24-year-old Pittsburgh resident, said. “We didn’t have WiFi or cable, so we’re always looking for things to do.” 

The geocaching rules are simple: If you take something from the geocache, then you must leave something of equal or greater value. You then write about your find in the cache logbook. The website also encourages geocachers to log their experiences online, so that other geocachers can see what’s been recently found. 

While the journey through wilderness can be half the prize, Alex Bush, an undecided sophomore, described the unusual rewards geocachers sometimes find in the cache. 

“Someone actually put a cache on an island in the middle of the Allegheny with a reward,” Bush explained. “If you found it first, there were several rare collectors coins inside to take home with you.”

According to the website, the members of the geocache community are in charge of hiding the geocaches. The website makes sure to emphasize that anyone in the geocache community can hide a cache by submitting the geocache coordinates to the website for a volunteer to review. 

“Together, my family and I searched for various geocaches,” Koch said. “Some were near rivers or streams. Some were extremely easy. Some were extremely hard. Some led us to places we would have never found. Most were just a good time.”