OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 142

phone while searching, and I avoid caches near schools and playgrounds unless I have my
kids with me. You may laugh, but if you're a middle-aged man, just try spending twenty
minutes carefully rubbing your fingers over every inch of a playground's chain-link fence
and see where you end up spending the night.
Geocaching and the law have had something of a checkered relationship. The creepy
lurkingisn'tthemostseriousproblem;since9/11,hidingweird-lookingpackagesinpublic
urban places has become an increasingly bad idea, and hardly a month goes by without
newsreportsofageocache-sparkedmassevacuation,whichtypicallyendsinabombsquad
dutifully detonating a small box of gumball-machine toys. Often these hides have been
placed,inviolationof Geocaching.com guidelines,tooclosetoinfrastructure:bridges,rail-
roads, or monuments. And it doesn't help that one of the most common kind of geocache
containeristhemostsuspicious-lookingonepossible:agreenmilitary-surplusammunition
can. You might as well hide your logbook in a round black ticking sphere with a sizzling
fuse on top and the word “BOMB” written on the side. In Arabic. “I use Tupperware now,
because it doesn't look dangerous,” says Ed Hall. “An ammo box: not so much.”
Cache containers in the wilderness can cause problems of another kind: once you attract
hundreds of people to some out-of-the-way spot, it's not an out-of-the-way spot anymore.
Visible “geotrails” tend to form as vegetation gets trampled and soil compacted. * The Na-
tional Park Service banned geocaching from national parks and wilderness areas early on,
seeing it as a perversely elaborate form of littering. But in a time of declining park attend-
ance, many wilderness managers are privately sympathetic to geocachers, who are model
visitors in other respects: avid, knowledgeable nature lovers who often organize cleanup
eventsastheysearch,usingthemotto“CITO”—“cachein,trashout.”InOctober2009,the
park service “clarified” its policy by giving park superintendents leeway to allow geocach-
ing where appropriate, and in 2010, caches finally returned to some national parklands.
Just three months after finding my first cache, I'm officially addicted. I don't go out on
twenty-four-hour power-caching runs like the ventura_kids, but I do get a little twitchy if
I haven't grabbed a cache for a day or so. I try to pretend that my habit is “just research,”
or I drag Dylan along with me as a sort of beard, so that I can blame it all on his insatiable
appetiteforplastictoys,buthetypicallygetsboredatleastanhourortwobeforeIdoandI
have to string him along with the promise of doughnuts so that he'll come with me for just
one more, I swear . I schedule errands around the locations of puzzle caches I've solved.
I switch out my Swiss Army knife for one that has tweezers (for removing stubborn log
papers from tiny cache containers) and a ballpoint pen for signing. In fact, I've signed my
caching handle in so many logbooks that I actually catch myself endorsing a check with it
once.
It's not unusual for geocachers to rearrange their lives around the game. “ Viajero Per-
dido ,” an Alberta geocacher, became so obsessed with a single cache on Nicaragua's Mos-