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They're the geo-cachers; the rest of us are muggles
Joe McWilliams
Lakeside Leader
Folks, it turns out we’re muggles.
We thought we were just ordinary Joes, going about our daily business. But to a select group involved in a certain new outdoor recreational activity, we ordinary Joes are ‘muggles’, named after the non-magical folk in the Harry Potter stories.
Not that geo-cachers are a secret society, or anything. In fact they’re happy to share the details of their hobby. They’d like us to join up. But a visit to the nerve centre of this invisible society of recreational GPS users, at geocaching.com, shows people are having a lot of fun hiding and finding things in the midst of a general population that is completely unaware of it.
‘This is a high muggle area,’ reads a comment left by one geo-cacher, referring to a cache site in Slave Lake. ‘Everyone and their dog are walking through here.’
Evidently there are dozens of caches in and around town. The longitude and latitude of each – or ‘waypoints’ – are recorded, along with clues and a description of the type of cache and the nickname of the cacher, on the website. Anyone with a GPS (global positioning system) device can use it to locate the cache, using the given waypoints, usually within a few feet.
It’s all made possible by radio signals from satellites.
The GPS will get you close, but you still have to find it. Judging by the comments on the website (each cache has its own growing online record of visits), people have tried and failed often enough. Those who succeed often record what they took from the cache and what they replaced it with. That’s apparently the protocol that’s generally followed.
Folks passing through on the highway have taken a few minutes to zero in on caches, signing the log books and perhaps leaving an item before carrying on with their journey.
Ken Caissie of Slave Lake is an avid geocacher. He says there are over 75 caches between Fawcett Lake and Joussard, and the number is growing rapidly. Several are right in town, where interference from ‘muggles’ is likely to be a factor when retrieving and replacing a cache.
“There are times you get muggled,” says Caissie, meaning discovered in the act, in which case an explanation usually works.
Caches can be anything from a plastic container buried in the bush to a magnetic keyholder attached to a bridge beam. Or nothing at all. Geo-cacher Kelly Harlton says he registered an unusually large birch tree in the bush as a geo-cache, just as a way of letting people know it was there.
But in most cases, those who set up the caches fill containers with small items. Here’s the blurb on one of the Slave Lake geocaches, hidden on March 26 by someone calling him or herself ‘Venturetrex’.
‘Two Camo’d 1/2 litre plastic jar filled with lots of goodies. FTF PIN. Situated in a Recreational Area in Slave Lake. This one is for all ages but kids should let an adult open it. It is tricky to open. Hide the cache as you found it please.’
There’s a clue included and it looks like this: Lbhe srrg fubhyq or jryy tebhaqrq ba Green Svezn.
Some caches are part of a series, and contain clues without which the series of ‘finds’ can’t be completed. Such are two set up around Slave Lake by VentureTrex – one centred on bridges in the M.D. and the other on hotels and motels in town.
Are we talking about a new type of tourism here? Apparently we are.
“There are people that just do geo-caching holidays,” says Kathy Wright of Big Lake Country Tourism, a sort of a ‘have GPS, will travel’ scenario.
Wright says she was surprised to learn that there’s a geo-cache right near the visitor information centre where she works, when somebody mentioned they’d been there and found it.
Geo-caching jamborees (probably not called that) abound, and this summer Slave Lake geo-cachers will hold their first. Caissie says plans are to have it on the August long weekend, with prizes for finding caches first, the most found and that sort of thing. They’re calling it a ‘catch and release’ tournament. He expects people to travel to the community from out of town to participate.
Meanwhile, it’s going on all the time, all around us, and we never knew it. The next time you’re out walking the dog, and you see some otherwise respectable person poking around a tree trunk and then, noticing you, attempting to ‘act natural’, it could be a geocacher hot on the trail of a cache, just waiting for the muggle to pass.
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