The Fab Five?!

Geocaching on a Lake Murray Island--July 2006 Mason, Kira, Kelsey, Garrett, and Campbell

A Geocaching Glossary

camouflage: sticks, bark, rocks. logs, vegetation, and/or paint resembling these used to hide a cache from view

challenge: what must geocachers negotiate to locate the cache? can be physical (terrain) or mental (multi-caches, codes, camouflage)

compass: what the navigation screen of a lower-end GPS (like a Garmin eTrex) is not

container: what will geocachers find when they reach the posted coordinates? size and contents should be appropriate to the challenges involved in finding it

coordinates: longitude and latitude of the geocache’s or the geocacher’s location

even or up: how to trade one item in a cache for another

geocaching: sport whose name is derived from geo-earth, from “the practice that mountain men had of ‘caching’ goods in hiding spots for later use, ” and from memory caching in computers

GPS: Global Positioning System or a receiver that defines a location in terms of its latitude and longitude by calculating the time difference at that location for signals from different satellites

location: where are you taking the geocachers? can be remote, recreational, or in the midst of everyday life? can be scenic, meaningful, or simply fun to visit

logbook: where you record your visit; for microcaches, bring your own pen

maintenance: what creators of caches should assume responsibility for

micros: very small caches

multicaches: a series of caches in different locations

N 45 17.460 W 122 24.800: the waypoint of the first ever geocache (May 3, 2000)

permission: what you need to place a cache on private or public land

poison ivy: one of the many natural obstacles geocachers encounter during their search

stealth: the challenge of locating a cache in a public place without being observed doing so

terrain: difficulty rating from from ˜ (handicap accessible) to ˜˜˜˜˜ (requires special equipment to access)

travel bug: “Simply put, a Groundspeak Travel Bug is a trackable tag that you attach to an item. This allows you to track your item on Geocaching.com. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online.”

tree cover: one of the many natural obstacles GPS users encounter during their search

watertight: characteristic of most cache containers

waypoint: longitude and latitude coordinates (stored in a GPS) for a given location such as HOME, the cache, on any point along the way