Geocaching offers adventure in tech-savvy treasure hunt

One careful step after another, take your time and don't look down - the smallest mistake could mean the difference between being safe or plunging 60 feet into the Wolf River below.

There's treasure to be found just on the other side of the abandoned railroad bridge, and it's too late to turn back now. Welcome to the world of geocaching.

Geocaching is a treasure-hunting game used with Global Positioning Systems where people hide treasure, or caches, anywhere they want. Then they put the coordinates online for other people to hunt down and find. The contents of a cache can include anything from toys and baseball caps to metal coins, made especially for geocaching, with no monetary value, but all caches include a logbook where the finders sign their names to indicate they have been there.

The outdoor sport kicked off in May of 2000, when civilians could use a GPS of their own for the first time. The first cache was created just two days later in Oregon, and the adventure hasn't stopped since.

While most college students might be sleeping in after a night of partying or enjoying a day off from work, my Saturday involved climbing trees, walking through unseen cobwebs in the woods and swatting away insects from every angle in the middle of the heat and humidity of a typical Memphis summer day.

The day began at Shelby Farms where I met my geocaching guides for the day: Joe Greshm, 60, a retired project manager from IBM; Kevin Dufrene, 25, a student at Southwest Tennessee Community College; and Joe Wyrick, 54, president of a private company. All of them are members of the Geocachers of West Tennessee.

I had never done anything like this before so I had no idea what kind of clothing to wear. I felt confident that my ensemble of khaki shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes and a baseball cap would keep me comfortable. I was wrong.

As I met my guides, I saw they were all wearing long pants and looked a little more prepared than I was. My legs would later pay for my poor choice in clothing when we had to walk through thorn bushes in the woods.

I was given a spare GPS of my own to use so that I could see the location of every cache within miles. There are more than 800 caches in Shelby County, some that people see every day and never even realize what they are looking at. Caches can range in size from a bait and tackle box to a canister the size of your thumb.

We loaded up the car and headed to the first cache of the day, located in a subdivision off Walnut Grove Road on the edge of Cordova. As we rode, I looked over the printout of the cache's profile, which gave background information and a few hints to find the thing.

We parked the car on the edge of the subdivision and got our supplies - GPS devices, bottles of water and walking sticks.

I almost questioned my sanity for doing this as we walked through paths created by previous travelers or sometimes even making our own, using only the compass on the GPS to guide us. We had to climb over fallen trees, kick bushes out of the way and cross a ditch.

When we finally reached our destination, I looked around. So where was the treasure? Since everyday GPS devices aren't pinpoint accurate, you have to search the surrounding area for where the cache might be hidden. Most of them can put geocachers within 20 feet of the object they're trying to find.

I was already covered in a mixture of dirt and my own sweat, and the two ticks I pulled off my legs didn't make me feel any more comfortable. I just wanted to find this thing and get back to the car.

After about 10 minutes of poking our walking sticks under a rotten log, searching on the ground for anything out of place and walking in circles, Greshm finally spotted the cache. I saw him leaning on his walking stick, which in the geocaching world means he found the treasure first. We all came closer and saw an ammo box tucked in the fork of a tree where it splits into limbs.

I was relieved to finally find the thing because I was having some doubts that it would ever happen. Wyrick told us he had been to this cache before, but could never find it. He has been a member of the geocaching world since December of 2005 and has more than 1,700 finds to his name. If he couldn't find it, there was no way a guy like me, who was on his first try and couldn't even get his GPS to work correctly, would find it.

We opened it, and I was sickened by the sight before me. The very first thing pulled out of the box was a baseball cap from Ole Miss. There were other things too, mostly just old coins and such, but the cap is what really stood out. I offered to take it and burn it for them, but Wyrick said we could take it and put it in another cache later in the day. We signed our names in the logbook and headed on our way.

I was surprised at the lengths people went to find these caches if there was nothing valuable inside.

"It's not about the stuff in the cache," Wyrick told me. "It's the satisfaction of finding the cache itself. It's the positive reinforcement that you worked hard and found something."

Although sometimes something surprising or interest does turn up in a cache, according to Dufrene, who once found a skeleton key made in 1886.

There are more than just the caches that require someone to go hiking in the woods and search in the trees. There are also "urban caches," which usually don't take much more effort than parking the car and looking around for a few minutes. For example, the second cache was located on the crop observation deck at the Agricenter off of Germantown Parkway. Thousands of people pass it every day and would never even know it was there.

Next, our adventure took us further into the cotton fields of Shelby Farms, where two caches were located within a football field's length of each other. Wyrick and Greshm had found these in their previous hunts, so they let Dufrene and me take the lead. Both of the treasures required us climbing down into a gulley using "geopaths," or paths in the environment created by previous geocachers, to get to the bottom.