Hordes of strangers are wandering around, following advice from the machine in their hands, trying to discover things you’ve walked past but didn’t know were there. It’s part of a new craze sweeping the nation, delighting millions of people but weirding out millions more, even producing police calls from alarmed passers-by and warnings about players being led into dangerous or inappropriate locations.
Pokémon Go? In 2016, sure. But in 2001 it was geocaching – and except for the “new craze” part, in 2016 it’s still geocaching.
“How many have I found? I think I’m at 18,000,” said Kim Runion of Penacook, better known to New Hampshire geocaching fans as Me And My Dogs because she’s usually walking a canine or two on her geocache hunt. “I totally plan vacations around geocaching.”
As you probably know, geocaching is a kind of treasure hunt that involves a cache, often just a small notebook but perhaps a box holding trinkets, hidden by somebody. The creator posts the cache’s latitude and longitude online, usually accompanied by a clue or two. Searchers use a GPS – originally a hand-held unit but these days probably in their smartphone – to bring them to the general locale, then do some real-world poking around to find the cache.
“The most unusual place I’ve found one was probably a drainage tunnel underneath a ball field,” said Runion. “The coordinates took you to the middle of the field, but there was nothing there to hide it. . . . You had to figure out that the only place it could be was under.”
Or maybe it was the cache at the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee.
“I was there with friends, and there was a group going diving. . . . They went down and got it for us,” Runion said.
There was a geocache put on the International Space Station, too, but Runion admits she’s unlikely to add it to her list.
The parallels are obvious between geocaching and Pokémon Go, the current craze in which people use smartphones to find locations where virtual creatures from the Pokémon anime universe are residing. (In fact, when the Wilton police department responded to a July 25 call from a neighbor worried that somebody was acting suspicious by driving up and down their street and staring at their cell phone, their police log avoided the brand name and called Pokémon Go “an internet game similar to geocaching.”)
One obvious difference is reality: The creatures in Pokémon Go don’t actually exist but are software creations linked to a certain GPS location, part of what is rather loftily called “augmented reality.”
Another big difference is that most important locations in Pokémon Go are created by a private company (Niantic, formed by folks from Nintendo and Google), whereas geocaching is a crowd-sourced activity.
Pokéstops and Pokémon Go gyms are property of Niantic, which can alter the game at will – as it did last weekend, angering a lot of people. Geocaches, however, are created by people wherever they want, and that’s a lot of places. Geocaching.com, the biggest website involved with the activity, says it has “more than 2.8 million geocaches waiting to be found in over 180 countries,” including 11,000 or so in New Hampshire, but there are plenty of others not linked to that site.
There are not only ordinary geocaches, but also puzzle geocaches, in which you need to solve a quiz to get the coordinates, and letterbox geocaches, in which you don’t get any coordinates at all but just clues as to location, and geocaches that are linked to specific events, including the rare “giga-event geocache” hidden at an event with at least 5,000 people. “They attract geocachers from all over the world,” said Geocaching.com.
As you’d expect from somebody who has found 18,000 of the things, Runion said the excitement of the hunt explains much of the appeal of geocaching, as does the joy of compiling a list of accomplishments and the thrill of finding something unexpected in an otherwise ordinary spot.
“I first saw a geocach (in 2005) when my friend’s dog dug it up on an island I was kayaking to,” she said. “I realized I walked by a geocache every day, and just fell in love with it.
“It’s great to get out in the woods with a mission, kind of a goal, and have a goal when walking the dogs instead of just doing the normal loop – pushing myself to go further,” she said.
But there’s also a social aspect. Runion hosts a regular gathering of geocachers called Cookie Crumbles, set this year for Nov. 19 in Bow, that has become a highlight.
“You get to meet a lot of people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. You tend to become like a family with a variety of folks. You have sort of the same interests but you get to learn alot, experience a lot,” she said. “You make friends at work, and with them you talk about work. (Geocachers) don’t talk about work; we talk about a lot of things, but rarely work.”
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)
