This past Saturday LittleTurtleMan and I attended the November meeting of the Georgia Geocachers Association at Oconee Veterans Memorial Park in Watkinsville, Georgia. The event was organized by Geomuse and Railroading and our guest presenter was Kevin Haywood, VP of the Georgia Orienteering Club. Kevin set up a 9 stop Orienteering Course for us to run using old school Map & Compass skills. No Coords, No GPS, just good old map and compass.
The course consisted of 9 stops. Each had a marker bag with a custom hole punch that puts pinholes in a pattern unique to each marker. The goal was to be the fastest person/team to hit all 9 markers and punch their map in the designated punch section (seen down the right side of the map in the image). Two of the markers (138 and 139) were mystery markers that you had to figure out their location based on their map coords listed next to their name.
This event brought back many memories of my time in the scouts and camping with friends and family. Getting the ol compass out and showing LittleTurtleMan how to use it was a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Before the event we hit some local caches at Butler's Crossing and also hit a few afterwards with some friends.
It never hurts to learn how to navigate and do things the old fashioned way because you never know when your GPS will die and leave you out in the middle of nowhere.

Be Prepared.

How's this for a container. A GPS enabled lock box that will only open when taken to the correct coordinates. Sound too good to be true? Well it exist.

GPS Puzzle Box Only Opens In One Specific Location

How cool would this be? To have a container that won't open unless its in the right place? Imagine the possiblities.

From the Article:

"The box has a button and an LCD display on the lid. When you press the button, the display will show you how far, in kilometers, you are from the goal location. It doesn't give you directions, so you need to triangulate where you're supposed to go via trial and error. Oh, and you can only press the button 50 times"

That would be a serious kick ass cache hunt. Too bad the cost would be prohibitive and the technology would make the cache very tempting for muggles to steal. Even worse, some muggle could find it and just press the button 50 times to render the cache useless.

Detailed blog post with pictures of the cache and its making can be found at here: http://arduiniana.org/projects/the-reverse-geo-cache-puzzle/

Some of my Geocaching buddies were featured in a Local CBS News Report (Geocaching Is Fun, Free Game) about Geocaching. I haven't hit "The Ruins" yet but after seeing it definitely plan on hitting it for the experience of exploring the area. Sure they exposed the hiding place on TV but its the adventure that drives us, not just the find. I'll embed the video once I figure out how to snag a copy but for now the link takes you to CBS Atlanta's video page for the story.