For geocachers, the prize is in the search
Christina Jolliffe | The Chronicle-Telegram
LORAIN — It may start as a hobby, but geocaching quickly turns into a lifestyle as cachers pursue their passion in the local parks, on the streets and even on vacation.
What started in 2000 as a test of the newly available Global Positioning System (GPS) between a man and anyone who answered his call quickly caught on as a worldwide phenomenon.
Just eight short years after that first cache — or stash, as it was then called — was located, more than 665,000 caches have been placed worldwide.
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| STEVE MANHEIM / CHRONICLE | |||
| Chris Thiery, 13, uses a GPS to find a geocache, with Reichen Grieve, 3, and Indy Grieve, 5.
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More than 4,000 caches are located in Lorain County alone.
And Marci Thiery should know — she’s hidden around 400 of them since taking up the hobby with her husband, Robin, and their son about six years ago.
After Robin Thiery heard about geocaching on TV, he mentioned it to his brother and the two went out searching. That’s all it took to hook the whole family and for the Thierys to form LoCo Geocachers, which stands for Lorain County Geocachers.
The concept is fairly simple.
Log on to www.geocaching.com, find a cache in your area, or wherever you might be traveling, download the way points into your GPS and begin tracking.
What you find once you arrive at the coordinates varies, but you always find a log book when looking for a geocache. Sometimes, you’ll also find travel bugs — metal dog tags with coordinates on them — or little treasures left behind by the previous cacher.
The only rule is “if you take something, you leave something.”
Thiery has left a variety of items over the years — homemade magnets, thrift store finds, McDonald’s toys and smashed coins, to name a few.
And cachers who turn out to Saturday’s event are likely to find more than one unique item, but the booty isn’t why these treasure hunters search.
“It’s the fun of finding it,” Marci Thiery said.
That and the camaraderie and fellowship that develops among cachers, she said.
Elyria police Corrections Officer Ivan Grieve started geocaching in 2005 and has traveled as far west as Las Vegas, as far north as Maine and as far south as Florida, but the people he has met in Lorain County are what has made it all worthwhile.
He got started in 2005 after learning about it while out on a letterboxing search with his wife, when he ran into a geocacher. So excited about the concept, he got started right away, before he could even purchase a GPS unit and found more than 100 caches using just the coordinates, reasoning and logic.
Today, he has logged more than 4,200 finds and has involved his wife and their two children in the hunt.
“A lot of times I’ll ask them if they want to go to the playground and they say no, they want to go on a treasure hunt,” Grieve says.
Who is he to argue?
The Thierys have logged more than 6,000 finds and their son, who started when he was 6 and is now 13, has logged 4,000.
And for every search, there is a story to tell.
Marci Thiery has traveled to the edge of Niagara Falls to find a cache. She has clamored around Mount Rushmore and rolled through the Black Hills.
She and her husband have even taken a plane ride over Lake Erie to check out the coordinates on a buoy as part of a geocaching mission.
And it’s all things she may never have done without it, she said.
Grieve says whenever he goes on vacation now, he puts in the ZIP code of where
he’ll be traveling at www.geocaching.com to find the behind-the-scene places that tourists don’t always see.
The history buff says he has learned more through his travels that way than had he stayed on the beaten path.
Of course, that can sometimes have its repercussions.
Searching in a local park a few years back with his infant child, an elderly woman called the police on him, thinking he had kidnapped the baby from a nearby park and was about to do nefarious things.
When police arrived, all he had to say was that he was a geocacher, and they understood.
The hobby is gaining momentum, and law enforcement officials are generally informed before organized local events, Marci Thiery says.
Besides, geocachers are really geo-friendly, even picking up trash while searching for their cache.
Contact Christina Jolliffe at 329-7155 or ctnews@chroniclet.com.
Geocaching Fall Fling
WHEN: The event starts at 11 a.m. Saturday with a brunch. Geocaching takes place all day for as long as participants want. Newbies can learn about geocaching from 1 to 3 p.m. at Black River Landing, and a campfire and evening geocaching event begins at 7 p.m. on Russia Road.
WHERE: The day begins at Black River Landing & Transportation Center, 421 Black River Lane, Lorain.
INFORMATION: Call Marci Thiery at (440) 288-4786 or visit www.lorainportauthority.com.
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Filed by Christina Jolliffe | The Chronicle-Telegram October 9th, 2008 in Local and State. Popularity: 2% |
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