September 14, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

The thrill of the hunt

by Sue Dremann

Bill Haydock doesn't fit the image of a treasure hunter. He has no sword, no eye patch or parrot on his shoulder. And don't even look for a flag bearing a skull and crossbones.

On any given day, he can be seen pounding the city's streets and alleys in business attire. Stealing moments during lunch breaks and before business meetings, his domain is not the seven seas but the Midpeninsula.

Haydock is geocaching, a hobby that uses hand-held Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) systems to seek hidden treasure. Participants seek small boxes and canisters containing trinkets in both rural and urban settings, using coordinates provided by a geocaching Web site (such as geocaching.com, set up when the sport emerged in 2000) and following clues along the way.

Finding the "treasure" is only part of the lure. Cachers find little-known spectacular views, unravel mysterious ciphers, solve puzzles and discover bits of history.

"It's the hunt that interests me. It's an exercise in stealth. In a public place, you have to not be obvious about it," said Mark Stein, an avid geocacher.

Haydock, daughter Sarah, 14, and son Andrew, 8, hiked along the Baylands recently to find the so-called "Duck's View" cache. Punching coordinates into his GPS unit, Haydock received a three-dimensional fix on the cache's location.

The hand-held units receive signals from satellites, fixing latitude, longitude and sea level. Haydock switched his to the compass setting, which pointed him toward the cache and showed how many feet he needed to travel before reaching his destination.

Sticking to the trail, the trio set out toward the bay, birds flitting from the underbrush. Andrew sauntered down to a creek and inspected a school of fish. Geocaching appeals to families who can take relatively short hikes and make discoveries together; plus, it doesn't feel like hiking -- an attraction for less athletic types.

Andrew took over the GPS unit as the trio got closer to the cache. Most GPS units are accurate between 6 and 30 feet. At 4 feet away, he went into search mode and gingerly looked around shrubs and rocks.

The cache was well hidden, under a shrub and buried under leaves and twigs. It was a "decon" box, a plastic waterproof box found in military surplus stores. Inside are a log sheet and several trinkets: Mardi Gras necklaces, toy action figures, magnifying glasses, medallions, and such.

Cachers take on handles known as user names -- Haydock's is Green Gables -- and leave signature trinkets. "Marwagsalot," who caches with a dog, leaves whistles; "digital fish" often leaves little glass fish. Geocacher etiquette requires adding a trinket to a cache each time a cacher takes one home.

Occasionally, caches get "muggled," meaning someone who isn't a geocacher steals the trinkets, but usually the treasures are creatively hidden. In fact, an unsuspecting public passes them every day. There are hundreds in Palo Alto, hidden in parks, open space preserves, college campuses; or in any number of nooks and crannies.

The cool trinkets are generally a draw for kids, but adults are attracted to the more sublime. Haydock's first geocaching experience took him up a fire trail in Monterey. At the summit, he saw "the most spectacular" view of Monterey Bay.

"It's something you'd never find yourself. Geocaching takes you off the beaten trail," he said.

Since then, he's gone geocaching to an underwater cave off Catalina Island and other locales, but some of his favorite discoveries have been right on the Peninsula.

"I used to think there were a bunch of mushy towns between San Francisco and Palo Alto, but I've found lots of interesting places that I never knew existed," he said.

An entire subculture has formed around puzzle caches, Haydock said. Puzzle caches sometimes give fictitious coordinates, leading a cacher to a spot where they find clues to the real spot. Some are cryptographic, others are based on trivia.

One puzzle cache was composed of musical scores; another was in Morse code, Robert Schauer, a retired engineer, said.

Some people are fond of creating ciphers. "The Rat" is a diabolical techie who creates interesting caches based on cryptography. "He provides resources on the Internet on how to solve the codes," Schauer said.

Schauer, whose user name is "Rain734," is a puzzle cache creator. When he grew interested in the hobby three years ago, he gravitated toward creating the puzzles because he wanted to do something more informative and entertaining.

"Haiku Park," a cache he created in Palo Alto, takes cachers to a place where poems on a building become the puzzle: the number of mammals mentioned in lines of Haiku become one coordinate for finding a cache, for example.

Cachers can be more avid than an early bird at a garage sale. There are an estimated 186,000 caches hidden in 216 countries. The world leader has found 10,000 caches; the Bay Area leader, more than 9,000. When a new one comes online, some race out to find it, regardless of the time of day.

"One woman will go out at 2 a.m. with her dog and a flashlight, just to be the first to find it," Schauer said.

Schauer has found 850 caches throughout the world. He and his wife have uncovered caches in Germany, Austria, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia. "Every time we go on a trip, it's greatly enhanced what we do. It gives us an incentive to stop and find a place; to find local color, or pieces of color," he said.

Caches are rated from one to five, based on their difficulty. They can be as accessible as a walk downtown, or as difficult as a mountain climb or scuba dive. Geocachers use a number of aids to help them find more complex caches, including topographical maps and more complex computer programs.

Stein, a pilot, uses topographical maps to find a series of virtual caches named after the planets, based on their distances from the sun. San Jose represented the sun; Jupiter was Shoreline Park.

"I flew out and did them from my plane," he said.


Staff Writer Sue Dremann can be e-mailed at sdremann@paweekly.com.

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