New high-tech pastime pays bonuses in cache

Jeff Moriarty has discovered a new sport that allows him to take his love of technology outdoors.

Armed with a Global Positioning System receiver, the Gilbert man and his wife, Dannie, hike trails and climb mountains seeking hidden treasure through an electronic hide-and-seek game called geocaching (pronounced "GEE-oh-cashing").

"It's so much fun," Jeff Moriarty said. "Geocaching is a puzzle, a treasure hunt. You have to follow the clues and unravel the mystery."

The rules of the game are simple: Participants hide a weatherproof container filled with inexpensive trinkets in a public place such as a park or a nature trail. Then they post the longitude and latitude coordinates of the treasure, or cache, on an Internet site, www.geocaching.com.

Other players search the site for nearby caches and prepare for a hunt by entering the posted coordinates into a hand-held GPS receiver. The receiver uses satellite signals to determine the exact location of the cache. Essentially, it tells the geocachers whether they're getting hotter or colder.

Each cache has a degree of difficulty rating on the Web site. The rating tells players how difficult it will be to find the cache and what type of terrain to expect. Some caches require a strenuous hike or climb. Others are simple caches hidden in local parks or by canal banks.

The sport began in May 2000, when the Clinton administration lifted the security restrictions on the government-owned Global Positioning System. The GPS is a network of satellites that circle Earth and continuously transmit coded information by low-powered radio signals.

A GPS receiver can pinpoint exact locations on Earth by calculating the distance from several satellites.

After the security restrictions were lifted, civilian GPS receivers could be used with more precision. Geocaching began several days later when the first cache was hidden in Portland, Ore.

Now the game is played worldwide, with 14,673 active caches in 112 countries, according to Jeremy Irish, who runs the official geocaching Web site in Seattle.

The Moriartys not only enjoy the challenging caches that take them to high mountain peaks, but also like the caches hidden in spots a few miles from their Gilbert home.

"Some of the fun of the urban caches is realizing you've probably passed this place 50 million times and not realized that there was something there," Dannie Moriarty said. "Once you find the cache, then you know something nobody else knows."

Players use sealed Tupperware containers or metal ammo boxes to protect the contents of the cache. To keep the cache alive, players may take an item from the cache only if they leave a new item in exchange.

Some caches contain unrelated trinkets such as key chains, sand dollars and pocket knives. Others have a theme, such as foreign coins or rubber bugs. A logbook is also placed inside the cache so players can record the find and share their thoughts.

For Denny Ford of Mesa, who has found 109 caches and hidden three, the buried treasure is not as important as the journey.

"We laugh about hiking for miles up and down mountains to exchange 99-cent items," Ford said. "But for me, geocaching provides an opportunity to go places I've never been before or that I've forgotten about."

Ford enjoys geocaching with his 12- and 13-year-old sons. According to many participants, geocaching is a great way to spend some quality time with family members of all ages.

Kevin Mart of Ahwatukee Foothills even found a way to get his elderly mother involved in the game.

"She wanted to be a part of what the rest of my family was doing, but really can't get around very well anymore," Mart said. "So she gave me this box of treasures she had saved over the years, like my first watch, and several items from my childhood. She wanted these things to be part of our geocaching treasure. By contributing those items, she felt she was taking part in the sport with us."

Dave Cruz/The Arizona Republic The Girons of Chandler, 5-year-old twins Cassi and Calli and parents Kim and Tim, take a close look ath their findings while geocaching. If they take and item, they replace it with another.

Tim and Kim Giron of Chandler often include their 5-year-old twins, Cassi and Calli, in geocaching adventures. The family has discovered many new parks and enjoys hunting for caches together. According to Cassi, the best thing they've ever found is a "squishy red frog with a hole."

The Giron family recently hid their third cache, a craftily camouflaged tin decorated by Kim.

"Arizona is a great place to geocache," Tim Giron said. "There are some very active geocachers here, and the Arizona Web site makes it possible to see what is going on locally."

Jason Poulter of Mesa created the Web site, www.azgeocaching.com, to "better the geocaching community in Arizona." He calls himself a "gadget geek" and admits that lately his team has been spending more time working on the site than geocaching.

There are currently 517 active caches in Arizona, according to statistics found on Poulter's Web site. During March, more than 300 Arizona teams participated in hiding and seeking caches.

"Geocaching is community based," Jeff Moriarty said. "It relies on people planting caches. Everybody feeds everybody else. This is what keeps it going."

For one unidentified East Valley geocacher, what keeps him going is the time he gets to spend with his 10-year-old son.

"We've found something we both enjoy doing together," wrote "Team Blunder" in a logbook found in a cache. "It gives me time to actually listen to him without being preoccupied."

"I think we've taken something from each of these cache sites," he wrote. "I don't mean the items we have taken. I mean the beauty of a park, or the simple act of watching a fish rise in a lake as you are walking by, or a sunset on the Superstitions from the top of Usery Mountain."