Let’s see is going left north, or northwest?
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
I don’t do well with compass points. Tell me to go left or right, but never north, or south, east or west unless you want me to get lost. I have first hand experience in this.
You probably won’t find it on your calendar, but this Friday, Nov. 10, is the birthday of the United States Marines. I am proud of the Corps, and the fact that I served with the Corps, but I am not sure the Corps is that proud of me. That’s because I went south when I should have gone north.
I was selected a squad leader. I got high praises for my leadership until one day I was handed a compass, given some compass readings and told to lead my troops on a combat mission. I got my squad lost for two days. Strangely, the Marine Corps then stripped me of my command.
So imagine how surprised I was when Dr. Stephen Leach, a dean at Florida State University, came up to me at a birthday party I was attending while visiting Florida, and asked me if I was into Geocaching.
I must have looked blank but when he mentioned the Global Positioning System and 60 year old, memories of being lost in the wilderness with a squad of angry Marines came back to mind. Leach explained in some detail he had spent the day Geocaching and had met a couple from Seaside, Ore. who were geocachers. He just found it strange seeing all these Oregonians in the same Florida town and the same day and he didn’t have to use his GPS to find us.
Geocaching, he said, is just finding buried treasure, without the use of an old fashioned compass. Instead the GPS system is employed. What I found so intriguing about this new sport is that the first documented placement of a cache with GPS assistance took place on May 3, 2000, by Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Ore. Ulmer hid some item posted it on the Usenet newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. By May 6, 2000, it had been found and logged in by Mike Teague of Vancouver, Wash.
It is a good thing they didn’t send me after it, or the world would still be looking for the cache Ulmer stashed. Today, well over 350,000 geocaches are currently placed in 222 countries around the world, registered on various websites devoted to the sport. And I am still trying to find my way out of the wilderness of compass points.
The activity born in Oregon was originally referred to as GPS stash hunt or gpsstashing. This was changed after a discussion in the gpsstash on-line discussion group , when it changed the name "stash" to "cache."
There are many types of caches. Some are easy others are very difficult. There are even examples of caches under water, 50 feet up a tree, on high mountain peaks, on the Antarctic continent and above the Arctic Circle.
There are a number of web sites that list geocaches around the world. The largest is Geocaching.com that began operating in 2000. This site has members worldwide, and hundreds of thousands of caches available.
If professor Leach were to grade me on what I learned about geocaching, he’d probably discover what those Marines in combat school understood. This dunderhead only understands left and right, or as the Marines were quick to say, Hayfoot, Strawfoot.
Professor Leach should have known that. He was a tank officer with the Marines in the 1970s.
Semper Fi professor, but please don’t send me looking for a cache among those alligators in Florida.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)