Once the preserve of the uber-geeky, the high-tech cyber scavenger hunt called geocaching is exploding in popularity.
The result is thousands of new caches and cachers, spinoff pursuits, geo-burgers, geo T-shirts and the area around Wilberforce, Ont., branding itself the new Geocaching Capital of Canada.
“It's just amazing how fast it's picking up worldwide,” said Owen Parker of the Saskatchewan Geocachers Group.
When he started three years ago, there were two dozen dedicated cachers. Today there are well over two hundred — from teens to seniors — poking, peeking and prodding around 600-plus sites across Saskatchewan alone.
Two provinces away in Wilberforce, Mary Barker says she used to get two or three people visiting her cache sites a month. Now there are hits every day — from campers, passersby or the just plain curious.
“People are more savvy with computers and the Net and the GPSes are showing up in cars, so people may not know how to use a handheld GPS but they are more aware of what a GPS is,” says Barker.
Geocaching began seven years ago, when global positioning systems were made available to the public. Adventurers use GPS receivers to track down caches that have been logged on to the activity's official website, www.geocaching.com.
The caches are camouflaged containers containing little trinkets or perhaps geocoins, which are registered markers that can be traced and followed on the website.
The caches range from pails of items hidden under logs in a forest to tiny messages wrapped in film containers in phone booths or inside magnetic key holders taped under a bus stop bench.
The caches usually contain a logbook for finders to record observations. Visitors can take mementoes from the caches, though if they take one they should replace it with something else. They then usually write up their find online on the web page.
There are more than 200,000 caches around the world, three-quarters of them in North America.
The growing popularity has prompted Parks Canada to draft a new policy halting geocaching in sensitive ecological and cultural areas.
And places like Wilberforce hope caching in may mean cashing in. Barker runs Agnew's General Store, the post office and geocache hub of the area at the southern tip of Algonquin Park, about two hours north of Toronto.
Wilberforce, together with six nearby communities, recently dubbed itself the Geocaching Capital of Canada.
“We needed something to draw the tourists in. Geocaching is such a wonderful sport and it's so environmentally friendly that it just seemed like the ideal thing to promote,” said Barker.
Her store also sells official lanyards, antenna mounts, travel crests along with little whistles and tiny flashlights to leave behind at cache sites.
The local restaurant has the geo-burger and one hotel has a geocache getaway package. Other retailers are offering discounts and specials to geocache and a lot of businesses are posting their GPS co-ordinates. They run social events and tutorials on caching.
Back in Melville, Sask., Parker says he began caching when he went online to find out how to use his GPS and got hooked on the thrill of discovery.
“Ninety per cent of the rural locations are going to take you to a spot that you've never been or maybe have driven by. But you go 100 yards up a hill and you can probably see for miles.”
Along with geocaching, there has been a plethora of spinoff or related projects, including: —(at) Geopoker: Contestants try to collect the best poker hand by finding a moving container containing a poker log.
—(at) Waymarking: Travellers visit unique spots, like an outdoor maze, and add a piece of unique information to it for an online blog.
—(at) Puzzle caches: The cacher has to first decipher clues to figure out the co-ordinates for the caches.
—(at) Reverse cache: Participants have to locate an object and then log on to its co-ordinates.
There are also national and international competitions and races involving geocoins, says Parker.
His Saskatchewan group recently had a number of such “coins” made up at $10 each. They are cast in the shape of the province and Parker hopes they'll be cached at every national park.
Geocoins have become so popular, they've become a subculture like pin trading, he said. At one recent event he met a woman with two binders full of geocoins.
“She must have had 500 to 600 of them,” he said.
In Canada, Ontario still leads in total cache sites with more than 7,000, followed by Quebec at 6,400, and B.C. at 5,500.
