The countryside's hidden treasures

STROLLING through the rolling hills and open plains of Surprise View in the Derbyshire Peak District, Nicola Moorhouse and Chris Shorter stopped for a moment to take in the views.

Noticing something strange behind a pile of rocks, they cautiously approached the object, not realising that a whole new adventure was about to begin.

What they found was much more than a sandwich box. It was a sandwich box filled with eclectic objects, a strange mixture of numbers and a log book with hundreds of signatures in it. Nicola and Chris had inadvertently discovered Geocaching.

Now in its tenth year, Geocaching has become a global past time, with an estimated five million people of all ages searching for any out of the 1,058,752 active geocaches around the world.

Known among players as a high-tech treasure hunt, the basic idea is to track down a geocache with a GPS devise using coordinates given on geocaching.com. The co-ordinates take players to the approximate location of a hidden object, which they must then find and log.

If a player wishes to take a souvenir object out of the box, they must replace it with something of equal or greater value before returning the box to its original position.

Nicola said: “I was a bit wary of what this box was at first, so I made Chris open it. I’m so glad we did though, I think it’s so exciting! It’s our new hobby now.”

Chris and Nicola left a message in the log book thanking them for the introduction into the sport – which they happened to discover on Nicola’s 24^th birthday.

The couple are now fully fledged geocachers, using the GPS on Chris’ phone to seek out hidden boxes under the name ‘Banana Bomb’.

Geocaching began on May 3^rd, 2000, only a few hours after GPS technology - which had been reserved for military use - was opened up for public access.

Dave Ulmer, a computer consultant from Beavercreek, Oregon, USA, decided to test out GPS by filling a bucket with a log book and slingshot before hiding it somewhere in Beavercreek.

He logged the coordinates on an online GPS users’ page, and within three days, two people had found it and logged their experiences online.

This May bank holiday weekend more than 600 events will take place worldwide to mark the ten year anniversary of geocaching, from Afghanistan to Quebec, and even Halifax, where on Saturday May 1^st geocachers will meet at N53 degrees 42.801 W001 degrees 52.691 – otherwise known as the pub.

For more information on geocaching, go to www.geocaching.com.