Have you ever been Geocaching? Well I had my first experience with it about a year ago. I was walking over an unnamed (don’t want to ruin the fun) local Alaskan overpass, when I caught sight of something sticking to the side of the guardrail. A popular candy tin was cleverly attached and disguised. After opening the tin I discovered the cache. A teeny pencil and paper were inside. I saw name after name scribbled on this ragged piece of parchment and I was hooked. I had to learn more.
I told a friend about what I had found and he laughed. I was a bit hysterical at the time, having recently watched National Treasure and the DaVinci Code, so he calmed my nerves by telling me that it wasn’t a national plot, nor had it been there for hundreds of years. It was a Geocache, a little container that people look for around the world via very precise latitude and longitude coordinates. “Is geocaching common in Alaska?” I asked. “Of course it is! My family has been doing it for years! It’s a great excuse to go hiking!” he responded. That weekend he took me out on a trail with him and his friends, all with their own little GPS units.
We found one nestled in an outcrop of rocks. It was a small Tupperware container with a pen and notepad inside, just like the one I had mistakenly found. The difference with this little treasure was that we were the FTF, or first to find. This can mean a lot of different things which all depend on the person who first placed the cache. We looked at the directions again:
“FTF is treated to lunch on me.”
Sweet! Inside the container was a coupon to a local pizza joint for two free large pizzas. Not only did we get lunch but we also got to put our names on the paper first, and we posted our find on the geocaching website that it was listed at.
I was hooked for life, and I hope you decide to go try Geocaching in Alaska for yourself, it sure is a wild adventure!