Cold Cache

Kati and Steve were standing at the foot of a fallen tree, its roots casting spiraled shadows onto the beach. Its trunk stretched a few yards out into the lake before disappearing under the surface. According to their global positioning system, the coordinates of the hidden treasure would put them 20 yards further into the water. Maybe the lake had risen. Maybe the cache was visible at first, but now they’d have to swim for it. They figured something had to be there, because it was registered at Geocaching.com, the official website of the world-wide, high-tech scavenger hunt called “geo-caching.”

The primary equipment for this new form of recreation is the GPS receiver, a digital navigation device which triangulates satellite signals to determine its exact location on Earth. Geo-cachers use the web to index their hidden treasures for each other. There are more than 400 caches in Minnesota, and dozens around the Twin Cities.

Kati said nearly all caches up in Ontario require hiking rough terrain and wading through marshes. Here in suburban Minneapolis, Steve took his shoes off and crawled onto the log, but he couldn’t find anything. On the way back he slipped and fell in the water. But as he was about to swing around the tree back to the beach in his wet jeans, he spotted the cache tangled in sprawling roots. It was a square Tupperware container bound in rubber bands, filled with cheap trinkets to take as souvenirs, plus a notebook and pen to record their successful trek. They left a plastic blue stone and took a small stuffed frog. A cryptic tag was attached to the frog with some kind of identifying number.

From the website, they learned that the frog’s name is “Dig ’Em,” and he is a “travel bug”—an itinerant little fellow that geo-cachers are supposed to move from cache to cache. Dig ’Em’s purpose is to see as many states as possible. Up to then, he had traveled 30 miles and been in three caches, all within the state of Minnesota. Now Dig ’Em was in luck. Steve and Kati were planning a trip out east, and they would have time for some geo-caching. Eventually they left him in a hollowed-out flashlight hidden in some bushes in Boston. Dig ’Em has now logged 1,153 miles. That’s impressive, but other older bugs have been through dozens of countries. As they circle the globe, their owners hope they eventually will return to their home cache.

The bulk of caches are hidden in Europe and North America, but they can be found in 134 countries including such exotic locations as Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The idea seems to be to lead people to places they wouldn’t otherwise see, places not typically highlighted on a tourist map. There are caches everywhere, frequently in the least likely places. On their trip east, Steve and Kati went geo-caching in Central Park, and their GPS led them to an isolated patch of trees and a mound roughly the shape of a human. When Kati approached, a swarm of flies flew up and buzzed angrily around her head. They gave up on that cache, deciding there is such a thing as too much adventure.