Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Globe and Mail
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When family fun becomes a bomb scare
SIRI AGRELL
From Friday's Globe and Mail
August 1, 2008 at 9:12 AM EDT
When a Muggle finds a cache, they don't usually blow it up.
If that sentence doesn't seem to make any sense, you are not familiar with geocaching, a popular outdoor activity in which hidden treasure is sought out with the help of hand-held GPS devices.
There are 624,542 geocaches around the world - stealthily hidden containers ranging in size from film canisters to jumbo Tupperware containers, squirrelled away in parks, woods and some urban areas.
Thousands of Canadians search for these caches each day, logging their finds on geocaching.com.
In Ottawa last week, a Muggle (someone not part of the geocaching society) spotted a badly placed cache under a bridge, prompting police to shut down a major road for more than four hours while they investigated the suspicious package.
At least two dozen police officers, 11 firefighters and six paramedics arrived at the scene, and the cache - a metal tin containing a log for geocachers to record their find - was eventually blown up.
"I think it was a really poor place to put a cache," said Alane Martinuzzi, a Grade 5 teacher from Ottawa who regularly geocaches with her husband and three kids. "Usually we put them in parks or in the woods, not right in an urban area. You don't place them somewhere it will be misconstrued."
Geocachers enter their postal code or location into geocaching.com, an international registry for the pastime, and can download to their GPS devices the nearby caches, which are graded by the difficulty of the terrain.
The GPS devices, while effective, will only get you within three to six metres of the hidden treasure, so some actual old-school hunting is required.
The Martinuzzi family started making regular geocaching forays about a year ago, and so far have logged about 80 finds.
"We've had quite a few that we haven't found, and that's frustrating for the kids," Ms. Martinuzzi said.
Ken Arnou, a 41-year-old geocacher from Peterborough, Ont., said these DNFs - or Did Not Finds - are annoying, but not enough to dissuade him from his hobby. "It gets you outside to places you might not normally go," he said. "It might be a lookout or someplace that's a bit different."
Many of the caches include small trinkets, mostly dollar store items. All prizes must be replaced, but other caches also contain what are called travel bugs, which can be taken to another cache, their travels logged and monitored online.
"We set up a travel bug in Jasper and are waiting for it to come back to Peterborough," Mr. Arnou said. "Other cachers will pick it up and drop it off at another cache. When we get it back, I think it'll be pretty incredible."
Bob Bunting, an Internet consultant and founder of the B.C. Geocaching Association, takes great pleasure in hiding caches around the province.
"It's a real geeky thing," he said. "I've always said the best thing about geocaching is that it gets geeks away from the keyboard and out into the sunlight."
But not all cachers follow the rules or bother to find an exciting location for their hidden prize.
Originally, caches were meant to lead people to out of the way places, spectacular views or along incredible trails.
Now, many are "crappy caches," he said, hidden in easily found urban locations or spots that could put the hunter in danger.
This is the kind of behaviour that leads to bomb scares like the one in Ottawa last week, said Mr. Bunting.
In the United States, security scares caused by geocachers are common, he said, and as the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver approach, he believes B.C. cachers must be extra cautious about where they hide their treasure.
"When the world comes here we certainly don't want things like that getting on the news," he said. "I wouldn't want a bridge to be shut down because someone saw a sandwich container that didn't look quite right."