There’s a malaise peculiar to January, induced by lying around, eating lots of pot roast and cheap chocolate (that stuff that tastes like lecithin, with the mouthfeel of a crayon), and a precipitous energy drop, which usually occurs around the time that large wads of wrapping paper get stuffed into trash bags.
The best cure for this is simple: Go outside. Move around. Not so easy if you’re feeling logy, especially if there are new consumer electronics in the house. Though if one of those gifts happens to be a GPS device, you may be in luck…
Geocaching is a 10-year-old sport that uses a GPS (global positioning system) to lead hikers through parks and woods to find “caches,” which in simple form may be a one-page log sheet curled up inside a plastic film canister, or more elaborately, a giant ammo box with a logbook and trinkets to reward a persistent searcher. Similarly, a cache may require an easy trot through a park, or a long, demanding hike through the woods.
Michael Henthorn, co–vice president of the St. Louis Area Geocachers Association, says the first thing SLAGA members do on New Year’s Day is “get a group together, pick a couple of really hard caches. Out along the Meramec River, there’s a few that are high difficulty; there’s one on Proffit Mountain that’s really tough. It’s a long hike in and a long hike out. That’s what makes them difficult, usually, is the difficulty of getting to them. Sometimes we just go up to a park and hit a whole bunch of caches in a row.”
Henthorn says a lot of people actually prefer to cache in the winter, when the undergrowth is down and wooded locations are easier to access. “Plus, the poison ivy is gone, and those people who don’t like ticks and chiggers—well, nobody likes those, but some people just hate ’em hate ’em—they’ll do urban caches during the summer, then go out in the forested areas and the woody areas during the winter.”
If you are totally new to geocaching, Henthorn recommends joining geocaching.com, the sport’s official site. Basic membership is free; the $30 premium membership gives more detailed cache information and access to online forums. SLAGA (geostl.com) also offers free membership, as well as a $10 yearly membership that includes four to six training classes (organized in conjunction with St. Louis County Parks) and access to online forums and the club’s GPS units. And what if a new geocacher wants to go out this winter? “If they go on the [SLAGA] forums and say, ‘Hey, I’m new to geocaching. I’d like to go out with somebody,’ there is always someone willing to say, ‘I’m going out this weekend. I’d be happy to go with you,” Henthorn says.
Henthorn also advises new geocachers to buy “the less expensive [devices], which cost about $100”—all they lack, he says, are the bells and whistles. More advice for those in the market can be found on geocaching.com’s “Guide to Buying a GPS Device” page. (Alternately, if you don’t want to spend money, or are more of a Romantic or Luddite, there’s the 19th-century art of letterboxing, which requires nothing but written instructions. Its practitioners don’t eschew the Internet, though—find them at letterboxing.org.)
As for adopting geocaching as a long-term hobby, Henthorn says it’s helped him stay physically fit, given him an excuse to be outdoors even when it’s not fishing season, and provided unexpected rewards. “I’ve found more great little neighborhood parks that I had no idea existed,” he laughs, “just because people have hidden caches in them.”
