5
votes
Geocaching!
Any of my fellow Tilderinos into geocaching? I've been aware of the hobby for a while, but I just recently decided to delve into it with my friends. Even though I'm in a rural area in the South, I'm still able to see tons of these things on the map! It's a fun way to venture outside and explore nature. The cache I found Saturday was well worth the mosquito bites, that's for sure!
I do it now and then. Like rodya said, a lot are pretty easy, but there are more challenging ones out there, including multi-part ones.
Lately I've gotten more into benchmark hunting, specifically trying to find "lost" benchmarks by following the old instructions. Some paper and a pencil, a pocket transit, a tape measure, and some patience have found me a few, often far from where the supposed coordinates were. But I'm fascinated by old-school surveying, so I enjoy the process as much as the hunt.
I found a few caches, I got a bit discouraged at how easy they all were though. Not in the sense that they were obvious or not hidden well, but in that they all involved following a trail for a while then heading off into the woods a hundred feet or so to find the cache. I understand that part of the ethos is to not disturb nature, but it seems like the activity would be a lot more fun if it involved going off the beaten track and exploring the wilderness.
I can totally understand that. There are difficulty levels, but most of them are pretty simple, as you've mentioned. Having to go to the woods and walk some trails and go off the trail for about a hundred feet sounds like a pretty legit cache though, in my opinion.
I've only done a few, but the harder difficulty "microcaches" were the most fun to find. There's not really any item trading since the ones I found were all about the size of a film-canister, but that allows a lot of creative hiding spots.
One of my favorites was hidden inside a hollowed out pinecone, which took almost 15 minutes of just walking in circles right past it before I caught on.