This past week I stumbled upon a relatively new sport called Geocaching. Basically, people have gone out into remote parks and forests and left caches (most are tupperware containers) filled with at least a log book, and have posted the latitude and longitude coordinates. The object is to use your own GPS receiver and go and find these caches. Sounds simple and boring, right? What if the cache is halfway up a sheer rock face, requiring climbing equipment? Or hidden underwater for a scuba diving adventure? OK, most caches are not quite this exciting. If nothing else, it's a fun way to get a family together for an activity. In Ashley's (slightly cynical) words, it gives hiking a point, a goal.
Well, Thursday evening I came home to find my brand new GPS receiver waiting for me in a shipping box. I bought a Garmin eTrex (for a good bit less than the MSRP), a fairly low-end receiver. It doesn't have a lot of fancy features, but still good enough for hiking around the woods. Friday afternoon between my classes, Ashley and I went up to Chataqua and found the Higher Ground cache. You can sort of see some of the hike if you plug the latitude and longitude coordinates into Google Earth. Very beautiful hike.
One last note about my eTrex, one really cool feature I think will be useful is the ability to enter coordinates not only in lat/long, but also in military grid coordinates, MGRS. This means I can use this unit when I go out to "summer camp" (Annual Training) at Fort Hunter Liggett this summer. Sweet!
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