Geocaching: One Man's Healthy Obsession

Bio

Meet Steve Wood, REI Outdoor School instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area. A few years ago, his discovery of geocaching transformed Steve from a generally sedentary fellow into an active outdoor enthusiast. Always toting his GPS receiver, he has tracked down as many as 100 caches in a day. Today Steve teaches REI Outdoor School courses in GPS navigation and geocaching. He is also a founding member of Geocachers of the Bay Area, a regional club with thousands of members. What inspires a man to track down more than 1,800 caches in a year? Steve explains himself to REI.com Expert Advice editor T.D. Wood (no relation).

A Passion Is Born

Before he discovered geocaching, Steve Wood was living a contented yet mostly indoor life as a manager of office and light-industrial properties in Northern California. A hobbyist with an interest in high-powered rocketry, Steve traveled to Nevada’s expansive Black Rock Desert (the site of the famed Burning Man Festival) in 2003 to join hundreds of fellow rocketheads for an FAA-approved weekend of blasts into stratosphere. People in the group would launch homemade projectiles as large as Sidewinder missiles to heights approaching 15,000 feet.

On this, his first visit to the event, Steve’s car reached the edge of the immense desert plain after night had already fallen. The sky and featureless desert had become an ocean of infinite darkness, and it was in this inky black netherworld that Steve’s interest in Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers originally flourished.

Q: So you reach the edge of this giant, empty desert after dark. How do you locate the group’s campsite?

A: To launch rockets legally we had to be out in the middle of this huge, trackless desert that’s 60 miles wide. During the day you could find your way into camp by following orange cones they set up about every 100 yards or so. But at night headlights can’t really reach from cone to cone. There are no reference features at all, so it’s really hard to find your way. I tried, but before you know it I had turned off the path.

Q: What happened?

A: I ended up driving in a big circle. Eventually I realized was heading toward one end of the lake where there’s a bunch of hot springs. If I would have kept driving I would have put my car in one and it would still be there today. But I got lucky and I caught a glimpse of a car coming up a highway nearby. That gave me a reference point. I was able to turn around and find my way back to the highway so I could try and follow this car in.

Q: How could those people find their way in if you could not?

A: I found out the other guys out there were using GPS units. I learned that you can look on the tracklog of a GPS and gauge where you are even if you can't see where you are. That's a real useful thing if you're in whiteout conditions or in darkness where a map is going to be less useful. It made me realize a GPS has some real benefits. I thought, “Boy, this is really cool.” So I told my wife, “Christmas is coming up—how about getting me a GPS?” She went out and got me a little, inexpensive GPS, and I immediately jumped onto the Web to learn what this thing can do.

Q: What did you discover?

A: The first thing that came up was geocaching—a treasure hunt that revolves around a GPS. I thought that sounded like fun. I could take my kids out with me, and the site showed that there was a cache only a mile from our house. So we went out that afternoon and made our first find. From that point on I got totally lost in geocaching.

Q: How lost is “totally lost”?

A: It bit me pretty hard. Starting that first day, I put together a continuous streak with a minimum one find per day for 103 straight days.

Q: Whoa. And you might find more than 1 geocache per day?

A: The highest number of finds I ever had in a day was 107. It’s not unusual to find a few dozen caches in a day.

Q: That probably qualifies as an obsession.

A: I've slacked off now. I think I found about 1,800 caches in my first year. In the last 12 months I’ve found only about 200. I'm at a more manageable level right now. No one has to come and do a geocache intervention any more.

Q: Does everyone get into it as much as you did?

A: (Laughs.) There are a lot of people who complain of geo-addiction. Most of them, I think, are joking. If you're going to be obsessed with something, this is a good thing. It's healthy. It's social. And it's a lot of fun. I do know a number of cachers who are where I was when I first discovered it. They go out every single day. All their vacations revolve around finding caches—and they have a great time.

Geocaching: Fun on Many Fronts

Q: What’s the appeal of geocaching?

A: As a kid my parents took vacations in Yosemite, and I got to go on hikes and play in the creeks. Once I got to be an adult I was spending a lot of time in an office and working with computers. Geocaching had this technological hook, which appealed to me, and it looked really interesting on the computer—but that was just the bait to get you outside.

The first few caches I found were urban caches in neighborhoods. Soon I found that there are thousands in our community and a half-million around the world. So I started taking the kids out a lot and we pretty much found all the ones nearby.

Then we got out the maps. We found that were are some caches up in the green areas on the maps—open spaces. So now we're discovering all these parks; places we had lived next to all our lives but had never set foot in. The kids enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. How many things are there in life that are cool to both dad and to the kids? That made it fun.

Q: So how did this new hobby impact your life?

A: When I started I was a typical 40ish father of 4. I had become a lot less active than I had been when I was younger, and I was spending way too much time sitting in an office or in front of the TV. Before I started caching I noticed I was getting winded climbing the stairs to my second-floor office. But once I started geocaching, I was going on hikes and going further and further and further.

Q: How did the physical challenge affect you?

A: In the early days I was often invited on hikes of 8 miles or longer and found myself struggling to keep up. After I came home from my first 12-mile hike my wife had to lay me on the couch and just about feed me intravenously. I was dead. But I continued to hike nearly every weekend. Now I take guys half my age out there and I just smoke them on the trails. It's a healthy activity. It's a family activity. It's a social activity.

Q: What’s the social scene like?

A: I’m constantly running into other geocachers out in the field. It's a very social activity, and geocachers are a nice group of people. After I started, not only was I feeling better, I suddenly had this new group of friends, too.

Q: Tell me about your fellow geocachers.

A: It brings a very broad, interesting group of people together. I've never met anyone geocaching who I didn't like. I’ve been out with computer programmers who are half my age. One good geocaching friend is a retired FBI agent. I just attended Geowoodstock VI, the geocachers’ version of Woodstock, and it involved about 3,000 people. It was fantastic.

I've met people of all different ages, from all different parts of society, and we go out and hike and just have a great time. I’m pretty involved with local cachers. I became one of the founders of Geocachers of the Bay Area, a club that now has a few thousand members. Many of them are people who would never join a gym or try an extreme sport. But every weekend they’re out hiking the ridges overlooking the Bay. Geocaching is making them lifelong outdoor enthusiasts, just like it did for me.

Q: It sounds like a nice group. A little geeky, maybe, but nice.

A: After many years and several thousand finds, it's really the social side of it that I enjoy most. I really enjoy the friendships I’ve made. Most finds that I do now I do in groups. We'll go out on weekends into a park, go 15 miles and find about 20 caches.

Every now and then, though, a particularly challenging cache will come up that's interesting to try by myself. I like to pit myself against it and see if I can find it on my own.

Q: What’s the prize? What’s waiting for you inside a geocache?

A: Nothing of any real value. Just crazy stuff: cheap toys, Cracker Jack-prize things—but to kids out exploring in a park, that’s treasure. The payoff comes from the satisfaction you feel after using your GPS, your wits and your physical ability to find hidden objects that other people walk right past.

If you take something from the cache, then you’re expected to put something else in to replace that item. In geocaching, the idea is to always make cache better than when you find it.

Q: What are your favorite kinds of searches?

A: I enjoy more complicated caches. I've kind of settled into caches that require a group effort to find and usually require several days of work to find. They have multiple stages and puzzles, and a great deal of hiking and travel is involved. Some people call those epic caches. I think they're much more interesting. They can take upwards of a year to put together.

Q: Serious geocachers really go to that kind of effort?

A: You bet. I’ve created and placed more than 100 caches. I have one out there right now called "Beneath me," which is a play on words because it was beneath me to hide one of these out in a place that seemed easy to access, because people who know me expect more complicated caches from me.

But the twist comes when you find that it was placed in kind of a lesser-known underground walkway below a road. The coordinates put you out in the middle of a road, and unless you knew there was a walkway beneath this road, you couldn't find it. Once they understood this extra dimension to the search, people enjoyed the play on words. Below the road there’s a concrete tunnel that has one metal object in the entire tunnel. It's a magnetic cache, so once you locate the tunnel it's not a very hard thing to find.

Q: So about a half-million caches are stashed somewhere on the planet?

A: You can find them listed on geocaching.com. I’ve placed hundreds myself. Each time you find a cache, the proper thing to do is log onto the site and record your find. It’s interesting information for the cache creator and other searchers to know.

Sometime caches contain a “travel bug.” It sort of resembles a military dog tag. Anyone is permitted to take it—as long as you agree to transport it to another cache. On the Web site you must log the travel bug number to tell the owner that it has moved. That allows the cache owner to trace its travels around the world. They can travel thousands of miles, and the owner gets to take a virtual journey with it.

Q: Would you recommend geocaching to anyone?

A: Anyone. I’ve learned that anything gets people off the couch is a good thing. And, to me, geocaching is a great thing.

Editor’s note: Read more about geocaching (and get some of Steve’s tips) by reading our Expert Advice geocaching article.

Back to Top