A Virginia family stopped in Shippensburg Friday to find a tiny object left by a stranger in a tree.
The youngsters used a portable global positioning device – a radio-like object slightly larger than a cell phone – to communicate with a satellite to locate a film canister in a tree in a public place in Shippensburg.
By Marijon Shearer, Shippensburg Bureau Chief, July 12, 2006
A Virginia family stopped in Shippensburg Friday to find a tiny object left by a stranger in a tree.
Donna Haley of Roanoke, Va., took a side trip during a visit to Chryslers at Carlisle with her sons Kyle, 9, and Kevin, 7, and niece Charlotte Haas, 9, of Kembelsville, Chester County.
The youngsters used a portable global positioning device – a radio-like object slightly larger than a cell phone – to communicate with a satellite to locate a film canister in a tree in a public place in Shippensburg.
They declined to reveal the exact spot so that others could enjoy finding it themselves.
The canister contained a small rubber toy and a piece of paper on which about a dozen others who had already found the cache had written their names and the date they were there.
It had been hidden by someone the Haleys did not know and would never meet, who recorded the location by global coordinates on a website set up for the game.
The youngsters are fans of “geocaching” – an increasingly popular hobby that started with one GPS enthusiast who hid a bucket near his home in Oregon and posted coordinates so that others could find it.
Today, according to the official website, there are 287,043 active caches stashed in 222 counties. In the past week, the website says, there have been 208,453 new log-ins from people who found caches.
“I’ve been doing it for a little over a year,” says Donna Haley. “It’s a good thing for the kids when we’re on the road.”
The Shippensburg cache was their second find of the day Friday, Haley says. They found one in West Virginia on their drive north, she says, and that one was a “trading one,” which contained items that the youngsters could keep and replace with something of their own.
Caches vary according to the whim of the person who hides them. Cache hunters vary also, but there are a few rules, listed on the website:
€ take something from the cache.
€ leave something in the cache.
€ write about it in the logbook.
For more information, visit http://www.geocaching.com/.
For the original article:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2006/07/12/shipp_news/news02.txt
The hider works at this newpaper and tells the finders if they need help to come look for him next door to this cache. He wasn’t in when this family checked in and it caught the interest of a reporter. Phideo knows him pretty well from what I gather.
