Chamber of Commerce

} } Hide &seek By Jason Brady There’s one near the jail, another at the train station and two at the Market House, where Rustyspoon scored the Sign of the Market House. Crazykim and Walking Spear found it too. Antz Fans made it their 560th took his brother, a first-timer in the global craze called geocaching. These new-age treasure hunters download GPS coordinates and descriptions leading them to hidden troves called caches. Small as a pill bottle or large as a footlocker, a cache’s contents usually consist of trinkets, toys or coins especially designed for geocaching. There’s also a log that people sign once they find it. All that’s required is a sense of adventure, determination and patience, plus Internet access and a relatively inexpensive portable global-positioning device. Fayetteville resident Gary Weir, aka badboygary29, recently invited all interested geocachers to a meet and greet. He posted the invitation on geocaching.com and about 40 folks came from all over: Greenville, Surf City, Lillington, Pinehurst, and from all different backgrounds: retirees, soldiers, plant supervisors and students. Weir himself is fairly new to the sport; he started geocaching about a year ago while stationed in Germany with the Army. “That’s where I went crazy over it,” he told the group. Among the gathering was Mike Cremer who was introduced to geocaching during a pickup game of basketball when he noticed people poking around one of the goal posts. Turns out the post doubled as a hiding spot for a cache. Cremer and his girlfriend, Shana Westfall, a teacher from Lillington, got the bug and became die-hard geocachers, forming their own team and geocaching handle, teamyomamma. “I love it, I really do,” Westfall said. She even asked for her own GPS last Christmas, which she immediately took on a trip home to Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks to the long arm of the military, many people bring – and take – geocaching to Fayetteville and around the world. Dwayne Hubbard began geocaching while stationed in Okinawa, Japan. When he started, there were 36 caches in the city; by the time he left, there were 218. It’s a small fraction of the more than one million active caches spanning the globe. The hobby may be new to some, but it recently marked its 10th anniversary. Today, geocaching treks can be as simple as a stroll through historic sections of a city to extreme adventures. Hubbard tackled a cache called Davy Jones’ Locker, a series of five waypoints, each The Fayetteville Area Convention and Visitors Bureau has launched its own geocaching trail. Find hidden treasure and learn a little local history on the GPS Trail Trek, 10 spots along Cumberland County’s Cultural Heritage Trails. Go to www.visitfayettevillenc.com one leading to the next clue. The final location was a 50-foot cliff overlooking the ocean and a sea cave below. Hubbard, a scuba diver, returned home to pick up his gear, swam into the cave and followed a buoyed rope 35 feet down to retrieve a thermos. Back on dry land, he and his wife, dried the thermos and signed the cache’s log. “Then I dove back down and secured the thermos to its location,” he said. Each geocache has its own name and may be hidden just about anywhere: along trails or lake banks accessible only by water, under rocks in the middle of a city block, tucked in drain pipes in Wal-Mart parking lots or out in the open for everyone to see. Geocaches are quite literally scattered around the world, including dozens being hunted every day right here in Fayetteville. It’s a game of hide-and-seek all grown up, but one thing hasn’t changed: the thrill is in the hunt. www.FayettevilleNCChamber.org | 25 find. And daddycache2010

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