Helen Keller said “life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all”. Follow Helen’s advice and dust off your sense of adventure this fall by trying geocaching, an activity that combines the outdoors, adventure, and treasure! Part explorer, part detective this modern-day treasure seeking activity has one goal: find the hidden treasure box called a geocache! There are over a million hidden geocaches all over the world and all you need to join the hunt is a GPS receiver (or a smart phone with a built-in GPS receiver) and a free account at Geocaching.com or Navicache.com to look up current caches.

Here are the basics:

Geocaching Tips from Junior Geocacher badge:

1. Choose a geocache with a low difficulty rating. Even a one-star cache can be quite hard to find!

2. Geocaches disappear sometimes, so read the recent logs on the cache details page to make sure that someone has found the cache recently.

3. Read the description (and optional hint) on the cache-details page and check to see what size the cache is.

4. GPS coordinates aren’t always exact, so once you are within about 25 feet of a location, put the GPS receiver away and rely on your eyes! Look for something that doesn’t seem quite “right”-perhaps an unusual pile of rocks or sticks. Think about where you might hide a cache!

5. The general rule of thumb is, “if you take an item, leave an item, and write in the log book.”

Still not sure what you’re doing? Juniors can join our Outdoor program staff this spring and work on their Geocacher badge. Not a Junior? Brownies can try Letterboxer,  an outdoor treasure hunt that is geocaching without a GPS. We have events at Camp Libbey (Defiance), Camp Whip Poor Will (Morrow), Camp Stonybrook (Waynesville), Camp Rolling Hills (Pleasant Hill, Letterboxer only), and Woodhaven Program Center (Lima). Spring program events open on Ebiz on November 1st, 2014 so sign up to join the adventure!

So what are you waiting for? Let’s go on a treasure hunt!