| Geocaching leads locals to captivating finds |
By: Melissa Kaelin
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Posted: Sunday, October 4, 2009 4:00 am
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By MELISSA KAELIN
mkaelin@owatonna.com
OWATONNA — Scuba diving.
Mountain climbing.
Repelling.
These high adventure sports are just some of the tasks that have been taken up by Dan and Tina Richter of Owatonna as they have sought out geocaches around the country.
Geocaching is an outdoor activity that uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to hide and seek out small containers other geocachers have left behind. Once found, the containers, called “geocaches” or “caches,” reveal a number of tiny treasures that have been hidden inside, along with a small writing log for geocachers to sign.
The Richters are still geocaching after the started five years ago. They said they not only meet a ton of people on the trails, but they are also able to take their one child, now 14, along on the hunt.
“It keeps the family away from the bar, and it keeps the kids away from the video games,” said Dan Richter. “It’s perfect. What better way to encourage exercise, fresh air and year-round activity?”
But for the Richters, geocaching does more than just encourage year-round activity. It has also inspired them to traverse a number of states, in search of caches large and small. Sometimes they will hunt out micro caches or nano caches, which are the smallest caches available — only amounting to centimeters in length. And on family hunts, they will seek out ammo boxes that are stuffed full of trinkets for geocachers to trade. Kids can remove a toy or other trinket found inside the box, as long as they replace the item with another trinket.
To master the woods and the urban pathways piled with treasures, geocachers combine their navigational skills with a type of hot-cold strategy, which tells them to the measurable foot when they should start looking for a cache.
“We look at the world a different way,” said Dan Richter. “We see a stack of sticks stacked the way nature would never stack them.”
After all, for the Richters, caches used to be a hard find.
“When we first started caching, there were hardly any caches around Owatonna,” said Dan Richter.
Now, he said, there are more than 5,000 caches in the state of Minnesota. And Minnesota happens to be the home of the largest “hider” in the world. Dan Richter said with all the caches that have been hidden, geocachers can choose any level of difficulty for their find.
“You choose the difficulty; you choose the type of terrain you’re going to do; you choose the size of caches you’re going to look for,” said Dan Richter.
In fact, by visiting geocaching.com, and searching for a location, curious minds can not only find descriptions about every cache ever found by Web site users, but they can also find 5-star ratings describing the difficulty and terrain of each cache.
“There some right out in public view,” said Deb Seath, who just got started this year.
There is even a wide variety of cache types, ranging from a traditional cache with a container and a log book, to multi-caches — which take several stops to complete, to a puzzle cache, which consist of complicated puzzles a cacher has to solve before they can even get cache coordinates.
“There’s such a wide array,” added Gail Buckingham, who is also a local geocacher.
She said she first discovered geocaching when she simply leaned back to rest on the shore of Lake Michigan, and placed her arm on a cache in Door County, Wisc. As soon as she learned what she had stumbled upon, she was hooked.
“What is interesting is how many people in the area are doing it, and you don’t even know it,” said Buckingham.
Dozens of people are already geocaching locally and countless others are caching in.
Melissa Kaelin can be reached at 444-2372.
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