Geocaching

A couple of weekend ago, Robby and I went out to Washington Family Ranch for a planning meeting for the annual Wild Canyon Games that are held at the ranch every June.  I'd never been that far East in Oregon, and it is drastically different than Western Oregon.  That part of the state is high desert with a dry climate and lots of field full of tumble weeds.  I almost felt like I was back in Texas (except for that beautiful Cascade mountain range in the distance).

Our main mission for the weekend, in helping prepare for the games this summer, was helping place caches that would be found during the geocaching competition.  Have you ever heard of geocaching?  It's a thing, y'all!  Like a really thing all over the world... and I had never heard of it!!  I feel like I've been deceived my whole like - there was a whole other world surrounding me that I didn't even know about.

So what is geocaching?  In a nutshell, geocaching in an outdoor recreational activity, in which people use a gps to hide and seek containers, called "caches", anywhere in the world.  And they are literally all around us.  They're in our neighborhoods, by your offices, on our college campuses.  And we (or at least I) have been oblivious to them.  Have you ever passed by someone standing on a corner or in a park digging around in a bush or checking out the bottom of a light pole?  They're not looking for their lost right or dropped car keys, they're probably geocaching!

On our way back from Eastern Oregon, Robby and I stopped in Hood River for coffee.  We decided to pull up his geocaching app on his phone (he's known about this for years!) and we found that there were five caches within half a mile of us.  So we chose one to search for, pinpointed it on the map, read the description and headed to the hiding spot.  And what do you know: we opened a small silver "electrical panel" (it wasn't real, it was planted on a building simply to hide the cache - again, I feel like I've been deceived about the world around me) and there was a note saying "congratulations! you found it!" along with a little notepad where you could date and sign your name.

 

One cache found, 2,302,718 to go!

Check out this website and put in your zip code to find all of the caches right around you: www.geocaching.com

 

sometimes you run across wild horses while geocaching in Eastern Oregon - maybe they were out looking for some caches as well!