The other day my friend Eric drove over to Kansas City so we could go rock climbing. He works as a firefighter/paramedic for a smaller town in mid Missouri and brought an ER nurse named Jeni (she was there to patch us up when we got hurt doing some stupid guy thing) and an ER security guard named Crystal (supposable we were going to a rougher area and he wanted a chick with a gun for our protection).
It took a bit to find the cliff we were going to play on and a little longer to get the gear set up, but once we did it was fun. The girls had no experience at all and my experience came from high angle rescue on the fire department.
On Jeni’s second accent we moved over to a little more challenging part of the wall and as she stood on the rock at the base of the cliff she looked down and saw a metal box wedged into a crevice. Our curiosity took over and all climbing stopped as we check out this mystery box. It turns out we stumbled onto a geo-cache.
A geo-cache is a treasure seeking game using GPS. The idea is that a person hides a weather proof container and notes the GPS coordinates on a web site so other people can go out and find it with their hand held GPS enabled devices. Usually inside a geo-cache is a log book to note who found it, some inexpensive prizes to take, and small token gifts left by finders.
The first documented geo-cache was placed on May 3, 2000 by Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Oregon. The game became possible the day before due to the US military lifting the selective availability on GPS, which restricted the accuracy of GPS to a couple hundred feet. It is a fun activity and gets people out for hikes to find one of the over 5 million geo-caches hidden around the world. If you are interested you should Wikipedia geo-cache and learn more including websites hosting GPS coordinates of cashes. Enjoy!