Recently the family and I took a vacation to Oregon. During the trip I had the divine privilege of visiting the holy site of the birthplace of Geocaching where I just happened to meet up with the Greek god of Geocaching himself. Who is that you ask? Why it turns out to be Hermes. Apparently there was no god assigned to the Geocache themes of hiding or camouflage so it fell upon him as the god of travelers. Made sense to me as, we all know, Geocaching is 95% about the journey. He was new to the assignment and was in Oregon getting himself up to speed on his new realm of management. He said after some careful consideration he had a few “directives” he wanted to institute, “decrees” if you will. In fact he had this list of ten “commandments” that he asked me to pass along to the rest of you.
#8: Get Good Numbers
Upon hearing he was assigned the title of “God of Geocaching” Hermes did a little research and found that all he really needed to participate was a smart phone and a free account from Groundspeak. Sure in the past a visit to REI and the purchase of an expensive GPSr unit would have been a necessity but with the advancement of mobile phone technology that did not seem to be a requirement any longer. After a few weeks of diving into his new hobby/domain he found there seemed to be a wide divergence between caches with good coordinates and a handful where it almost seemed as if the hider dropped a film canister and took a single quick reading and posted them. Hermes read on the geocaching.com that “it is critical to obtain accurate GPS coordinates” as accurate numbers are “the very heart of the activity”. “Really,” Hermes thought, “without accurate numbers you might as well be letter boxing!” Once I again I agree. There is nothing more frustrating than inaccurate numbers leading you on a wild goose chase. I always use my Garmin’s Oregon 400t when taking reading for a new hide but for this one I thought I might just try using my phone app. I took a few readings and returned home to look on Google Maps only to see the hiding spot was nowhere near where my numbers said it should be. I returned and got a much more accurate set of numbers with my Garmin. If you do not own your own GPSr you might ask to borrow one from a fellow cache before hiding a new cache. Short of that you should at least use Google Earth or Google Maps to make sure your coordinates look correct on the map. If not adjust them until the satellite view has them where they should be because I have found satellite images are extremely accurate when determining coordinates.