OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 139

in hushed whispers of great white whales like Psycho Urban Cache #13, a legendary West
Virginia cache that was dropped via helicopter atop a seventy-foot pylon in the middle of
the Potomac River. * Some of these caches are so extreme that they've never been found,
likeGokyoRi,leftononeofthehighestpeaksoftheNepaleseHimalayasin2004,orRain-
bow Hydrothermal Vents, left by a Russian Mir submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean in 2002. †
“Puzzle caching” is extreme caching for the mind, and its devotees forgo scuba or
rock-climbing gear in favor of a simpler piece of equipment: the sharpened pencil. 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 lon-
gitude. 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-centuryearthquakes,Chinesecharacters—I'mwillingto
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 bal-
ance the city onthe head ofa sufficiently sturdy pin. At one low point, Ieven 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 bot-
tomless gourmands of the geocaching world. Their dictum is to cache as much as pos-
sible for as long as possible. On September 27, 2010, a two-person team from Malibu call-
ing 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 effi-
ciency is planning. The ventura_kids' entire route was charted in advance, in an area with
notrafficorstoplights. Their Jeep wasstocked foranyeventuality,including tengallons of
gas and headlamps for each cacher. At each stop, team members would scramble like a pit
crew,typicallyuncoveringthecachebeforethedriverevenhadhisGPSdeviceunmounted
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