Geocaching: Discover Your Sense of Adventure

Sonta Frindt wanted her 10-year-old son to get outside and hike.

But even kids who like the outdoors may drag their feet after a mile in the woods. So when she heard about geocaching, she knew she had hit upon an activity that would turn a nature walk into an adventure.

“Now he loves going hiking when there’s a geocache involved,” said Frindt, 49, of South Salem. “In fact there’s a group of five boys from his school who want to join him on our treasure hunts.”

So what is geocaching?

Think of it as a treasure-hunting game for the 21st Century. Participants use a global positioning device (GPS) or a smart phone loaded with a geocaching app to find a container full of trinkets, called a cache, that another fellow geocacher has hidden. The person who has hidden the cache camouflages it and uploads the coordinates to geocaching.com. The seeker finds the cache and signs the logbook, perhaps taking a trinket and leaving one in its place.

How do you find one? Create a free account on geocaching.com or download the app onto your smart phone. Plug in your town or postal code and search for nearby caches.

There are over a million active geocaches all over the world—thousands of them in Westchester and Rockland County, according to according to the website.

For example, a search for caches in within a 10-mile radius of Mt. Kisco resulted in 362 caches. Within 10 miles of Nyack, 585 caches. There are almost 600 caches in Scarsdale. Wherever you are, or wherever you are going, there’s a cache to find.

There are over a dozen types of caches to do, from a traditional, single-container cache, to ones that involve multiple steps, clues or trackable elements.

“We love trackables,” said Sonja Lovas, of Bedford. “After geocaching for less than a month, and logging over 29 finds, we added a new element to the game and dropped off 'travel bugs,' which are metal tags with a serial code on them that your register online. As the owner of a travel bug, you can assign it a mission, name it, and watch its progress online.”

Lovas, 58, said she received notice that a travel bug she purchased (available online) went to Colorado and Maryland, another to Atlanta and the third is still on an island at Cape Cod. Frindt found a travel bug with a mission of “wanting to be with elephants,” and plans to snap pictures of it at the Bronx Zoo before dropping it in a new cache location.

For some, the thrill of the hunt is the reason to go geocaching. For others, it is the chance to explore natural surroundings that would otherwise remain undiscovered to them.

Sue Silver Markovits, 58, of Pound Ridge, said she is in “no way technological” but she loves geocaching for environmental reasons.

“I have ventured on many hikes on trails and preserves around my community—but this has opened my eyes to other conservancies I would never have known about,” she said.

Markovits, a teacher, said she has gone out with her husband and 26-year-old son. "I've left interesting pencils and foreign coins for geocachers to find. It's just a great excuse to get out and go for a walk."

What to know before you go:

• Sign up for a free membership on geocaching.com, click on the "Hide & Seek a Cache" page and search for a cache.
• Pick a geocache from the list, enter the coordinates onto your phone or GPS device.
• Drive to the location and use your GPS device to find the cache. Don't forget to sign the logbook and return the geocache to its original location. 
• If you take something from the cache, leave an item (of equal value) in its place. 
• Lovas said its recommended that you find at least 20 caches before you hide one yourself to better understand the process.  Once you place a cache, it also needs to be maintained and checked regularly to make sure it's not wet, the logbook is intact and it has a pencil or pen to sign in with.