Paul and Dana Gillin discovered geocaching and found it fascinating. Experienced writers, they read the available literature about geocaching and found something missing - stories about the people who play this game.

So they wrote a book! Months of research and extensive interviews in person and online with some of the most notable players in the game provided the basis for The Joy of Geocaching. I think it is the most interesting and compelling book yet written about our marvelous obsession.

Here is an excerpt from The Joy of Geocaching:

Excerpt - Chapter 6 - Caching to the limits.

We encountered two kinds of extreme geocachers when researching this book, and they couldn’t be more different. In fact, they don’t like being lumped together in the same category because their approach to the game is diametrically opposed. Nevertheless, we couldn’t resist spotlighting these people in the same chapter because both groups push the game to its logical limits. It’s just that one of them uses a car.

Extreme geocachers place and hunt for targets that require extreme skill, physical fitness, and a tolerance for occasional terror. Power cachers cope with sleeplessness, anxiety, and mental exhaustion in their attempts to log the maximum number of finds in 24 hours. We hope you enjoy meeting them. Let’s start with the crazy ones.

Extreme Cachers
When Wouter “Dutch” Sanders was growing up in Europe, he was fond of windsurfing, hiking in the Alps, and engaging in any “crazy stuff” he could find. Moving to the United States (specifically Macungie, Pennsylvania) and getting married settled him down a bit, but the spirit of adventure was still there.

Linuxxpert (so-named because of some early computer work he had done) discovered geocaching in 2007. Like many novices, Sanders started with the standard parking-lot and suburban finds, but he quickly grew bored. He noticed that some geocaches carried much higher difficulty/terrain ratings, including a few that were classified as 5/5—the very pinnacle of geocaching challenge.

Caches rated 5/5 are rare. If you were to draw a circle with a radius of 500 miles around Knoxville, Tennessee—a 785,000-square-mile area that reaches roughly from Baltimore to Jacksonville, Florida—you would find only 236 5/5 classifications out of the tens of thousands of caches in that range. A hide with a difficulty rating of 5 is “a serious mental/physical challenge that requires specialized knowledge, skills, or equipment,” according to the Cacheopedia.com website. A terrain rating of 5 means the cache “requires specialized equipment (for example, scuba gear, rock-climbing gear, a boat, or a four-wheel-drive vehicle) and the skill to use it, or is otherwise extremely difficult.” In other words, you’d better be in excellent shape to attempt a 5/5 geocache. Or, you’d better be a little nuts.

Linuxxpert is both. Among his 368 finds are 21 rated 5/5 and dozens more rated higher than 3.5 difficulty or terrain. He’s also placed four 5/5s and several others rated at the upper end of difficulty.

Linuxxpert’s geocaching adventures may involve ropes, ladders, mining helmets, and life rafts. He frequently places himself in situations that others would consider dangerous, even life-threatening. But for this extreme geocacher, part of the fun is conquering his fears. “I love to see people pushed to the limits,” he says.

He practices what he preaches. Linuxxpert has rappelled off cliffs over 100 feet high and dangled from railroad trestles spanning major rivers. He has spent over ten hours to find a single geocache and has tracked down some multi-stage puzzles that had 11 stages. “Some of the stages you can find in five minutes, some take two hours,” Sanders says. “That’s one of the thrills of the game.”

His hides are as daunting as his finds. For one recent placement (GC1G86E), his tongue-in-cheek warning stated:
"Do NOT attempt this cache if you are not in good physical shape, or if you are afraid of heights. Climbing gear WILL be needed, and you may get your feet wet. WEAR A HELMET WHILE CLIMBING THIS PILLAR AND/OR WHILE STANDING NEAR THE BASE! There is a lot of loose concrete debris that will fall down. Watch out that you do not knock the container off the pillar with your gear. It will kill you when hit, or more important, it will damage the container."

Rare Breed
Jeff Spencer (SNSpencer) is another thrill seeker. In the fall of 2007, he teamed up with a companion and headed out to grab and replace a 5/5 underwater container near Lake Tahoe that had been reported to be leaking water (GCG62F).

He tells the story:
We grabbed a few caches on our way up the mountain, then rented a kayak to go 700 feet out on the lake and do what we came to do. That’s when the day became an adventure. By the time we arrived at the boat launch, the wind had picked up and the water was getting rough. We headed out anyway, and found the cache on our first try about 12 feet below the surface. But a gust of wind suddenly blew us away. Within seconds, the GPSr showed we were 130 feet away.

We circled back, found the cache, and were blown away again. This cycle was repeated over and over. We finally decided that on the next pass I would dive into the water with the new container, dive down, unhook the old, hook on the new, and swim back to the kayak.

I rolled off the kayak with the new container in hand and swam down, but I couldn’t find the carabiner holding the old container on the anchor’s rope. So I had to pull the whole rope back to the surface. That wasn’t so hard, but the coffee can filled with cement that served as the anchor made it a real challenge! Kicking as hard as I could to stay afloat in the surf, I struggled to switch the containers, but the anchor was too much for me. I had to let the rope go.

Defeated, I swam back to the now-overturned kayak, where Dichroic was floating in the water. We took a short rest, holding onto the kayak, while I put on my life vest. We righted the kayak and paddled back to shore. Waiting for us there was a park ranger who’d been called by someone who thought we were drowning. We were okay, but the worst thing is that we were defeated! Mark my words: We will be back!

Life on the Edge
“Feeling like I’m going to die is exhilarating,” says George Merenich, a Dorrance, Pennsylvania-based extreme geocacher who goes by the handle of keoki_eme. “If it doesn’t involve a hike that means risking at least a little of my life, then I don’t want to do it.”

Keoki_eme and Linuxxpert enjoy a friendly competition in their region. Each says the other is nuts and both go to great lengths to prove his rival correct. They place caches intended to be so difficult that the other can’t find them. So far, neither has the upper hand, although keoki_eme takes particular pride in having subjected Linuxxpert to ten and a half hours of hell to retrieve The Gauntlet (GC1NEPJ).

As keoki_eme tells it, “The Gauntlet is at least eight stages with an extreme elevation change. It’s a killer hike for about a mile-and-a-half; you’re almost going straight up. Every stage is tough. At least three stages require rope. I conned my brother to help me place it and I don’t think he’ll ever go back in the woods again.”

The cache description begins with a four-minute YouTube video that advises the player to bring at least 150 feet of rope and plenty of water. “Start your journey EARLY,” it recommends. “This ain’t no walk in the park.”
Indeed it isn’t.

The experience of completing The Gauntlet is best summed up by this edited log entry from Clancy’s Crew, which found the final in March 2009:
Although we had all rappelled down structures, done some free climbing, and climbed many radio towers, some bridge girders, and a telephone pole with spikes, the whole ascending technique was new to us.… My trip down the cliff didn’t take long, although the lack of a wall to push off the last 15–20 feet was disconcerting. The highlight of the trip for me: After nine hours, I ascended a structure at one of the last stages, grabbed the cache, and ended up hanging in mid-air while removing the ascending gear. You have to trust the safety gear and harness, because it took two hands to remove the carabineer, pulley, and other equipment, with nothing to hold on to, and snow, ice and rocks below. Now we know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry—the cache wasn’t damaged.

Keoki_eme and Linuxxpert are sometimes joined by Maureen McArdelle, who got hooked on extreme geocaching when it taught her how to rock climb. Like other extreme geocachers we interviewed, the challenge of pushing herself to the limit is an important motivator. Extreme geocaching “has made me feel more empowered,” she says. “There is nothing I can’t do. You place it, I can get it. You create that puzzle and I will solve it. It has given me more confidence in myself.”

Being female has raised the stakes, since so few extreme cachers are women. She enjoys the odd blend of camaraderie and competition that’s typical of extreme sports enthusiasts. Players use good-natured insults to urge each other on. Her male compansions “are always teasing me about what color bandana I am going to wear, what color my toenails are going to be painted,” she said. But the taunts help her along. “I honestly don’t think I would have gone over the top on any of [Linuxxpert’s] pillar caches (GC1F925 and GC1G86E) without Dutch standing there telling me I am such ‘a girl’ if I couldn’t do it,” she says. And she adds, with some pride, “I climb barefoot and I think it amazes them.”

Hiding What They Find
With 5/5 geocaches being so challenging and rare, the people who find them are also likely the people who hide them. Linuxxpert recalls his favorite hide, Conquer Your Fears (GC17VAR):
There’s a big industrial park on the Lehigh River and this cache is hidden near an old iron furnace. There’s a[n abandoned] train trestle that crosses the Lehigh River and one of the containers is underneath the bridge. You have to crawl out to the middle of the river on the rail trestle and then climb down. The hint says to “look for what all geocachers desire” which is a smiley. I painted a smiley on the bridge.

In another stage, you have to crawl down into a hole that used to be an old iron furnace. And in the last stage, you have to crawl into the ceiling of another tunnel and make your way around a 90-degree bend.

Keoki_eme remembers another Linuxxpert challenge called “Too Difficult, Too Dangerous And Just Too Crazy!” (GC1812Z):
The first stage is on a[n abandoned] railroad trestle 30 feet above the river, but you have to climb a support tower another 20 feet above the trestle. The second stage is a 40-foot-high concrete pillar in the middle of the woods that you have to climb without a ladder. The third stage takes you down a long tunnel for several hundred feet, and the next stage is hidden in an old signal light.

The final is another trestle that’s missing most of its railroad ties. You have to balance yourself across the beams and walk to the middle of the river. There’s a magnetic ammo can that you can get to by crawling across the trestle.

Extreme-difficulty geocachers don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. One thing they agree upon is that after subjecting searchers to an hours-long physical ordeal, they won’t finish them off with a devious hide. “I make it a physical challenge to get there but there’s no way you’re going to miss the cache when you arrive,” says keoki_eme.

They’re also quick to call owners for advice on how to attack a challenge, and the owners are pretty reasonable about helping out. Everyone knows this is a potentially deadly pursuit, and they don’t want to make a determined player’s job more difficult than it has to be.

And even the extremists will admit that some finds are barely worth the effort. Asked if he remembers a time when he thought he was going to die, keoki_eme remembers one adventure on the Hawaiian island of Kauai with Tunnel #1 (GC146Q9) and The Other Way To Hanalei (GCHH2F):
It was the most grueling hike I’ve ever had. It was two-and-a-half miles on a mud trail as narrow as six inches from start to the finish. Then there was a mile-long tunnel with only a little dot of light at the other end and six inches of water all the way. It took us 45 minutes to get through the tunnel. Then we had to walk back the whole way again. My wife, Amy, was exhausted. I remember thinking, “If she goes down, there’s no way we’re getting out of here.” I’m not sure I would do it again, but I’m damned glad I did it.

Power Caching: Joy in Numbers
Ed Manley, the man we met at the very beginning of this book, prepared for GeoWoodstock IV for months. The annual gathering of thousands of enthusiastic geocachers had been a fixture on his calendar for years, but this year’s event was different. In 2006, GeoWoodstock would take place in Dallas, one of the caching capitals of the world.

Holding GW IV in Dallas was like staging a wine lover’s convention in Burgundy. The Dallas-Fort Worth area is infested with geocaches. In one six-square-mile area of Dallas alone, there are more than 80. Within about a 10-mile radius of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, there are an incredible 940 caches.

So this was the geocaching Olympics, and Manley (TheAlabamaRambler) wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to break the world record of caches found in a 24-hour period: an incredible 246 found by a team in Jacksonville, Florida, in October 2004. Manley thought it was possible to log 300 finds in one day, a figure that would have seemed absurd just a few years earlier because of the relative sparseness of hides.

The planning took more than two months. TheAlabamaRambler and seven other enthusiasts—three Americans and four Germans—had met and become friendly in geocaching forums over the last couple of years. They reached a consensus that Dallas was the chance to break the world record and, operating as a loosely confederated team, they had scoured the list of cache candidates to identify the optimal route.

They boiled it down to 500 cache possibilities, but that was just the beginning. Each cache owner needed to be contacted individually and had to agree to participate in the record attempt. Not all owners approve of team caching, you see, and the record attempt would be made by a group of eight men who, in the interest of time, would sign the logbook only once. Owners had to be cool with that.

Fortunately, the owners thought the thrill of being part of a record attempt was enough incentive to bend the rules. Everyone agreed. Meanwhile, a few of the members began playing with Microsoft Streets and Trips software to create an optimal route. Time was of the essence. Team members calculated that they could spend no more than three minutes looking for any one cache.

The 12-person Chevrolet van would have a driver, a scribe, and a group of designated hunters. When the location was reached, members would jump out of the van and search for the cache in a choreographed arrangement. While a few were searching, others would be in their van feverishly preparing for the next find.

The team gathered on Friday evening, laptops in hand, to go through a practice run. They hadn’t gone very far when it became clear that they had a problem. The process of digging the logbook out of each cache was going to slow them down to the point that the 300-find goal would be impossible. So they devised a workaround: Instead of signing the logbook, they would use a felt-tip pen to mark the outside of each found container. They believed that mark would be sufficient proof that they had found the cache and, after all, the purpose of the logbook was mainly to establish proof of the find.

On Saturday morning, the team hit the road in the van for what would become one of the most memorable days of TheAlabamaRambler’s life. “We laughed the whole time,” he says. “The Germans didn’t speak English, and we didn’t speak German. You can imagine the scene!”

Twenty-four caffeine-fueled hours later, the team staggered back to their hotel. They were bleary and exhausted, but they had found 312 caches out of 352 attempts, obliterating the previous record. In the end, they would agree to record only 295 of those finds, the result of a dispute that arose when the team split up to retrieve a trove of 17 caches clustered together. In fact, a debate raged on Groundspeak forums for nearly three weeks after the team’s feat was recorded, with members debating nuances of the caching rules.

The record wouldn’t stand for long. In late August 2009, a team of three geocachers—f0t0m0m, ventura_kids, and EMC of Northridge, CA—logged 413 finds in 24 hours (see sidebar [below]).

Geocachers, it appears, are sticklers for the rules. Several forum members took issue with the Dallas team’s decision to sign the caches on the outside rather than opening the log books and signing each one individually. Some members argued that record-setting attempts in themselves debased the spirit of geocaching by reducing the game to a mere numbers competition.

Despite the controversy, the so-called “power caching” phenomenon has gathered steam. In a community in which the number of caches a member has found can bestow a kind of celebrity status, enthusiasts are increasingly challenging themselves to amass impressive totals.

Sidebar: One for the Record Books
Power cachers are always pushing the limits of the game, and as we were in the final stages of writing this book, we received word of a new record claim by a team that included two people we quote extensively elsewhere: Steve O’Gara (ventura_kids) and Elin Carlson (EMC of Northridge, CA). They joined with Jim Hoffman (f0t0m0m) on August 29, 2009, in a midnight-to-midnight run that netted 413 caches in one day.

The trip involved extensive planning using GSAK, Google Earth, and Geocaching.com. Ventura_kids created nine possible routes, consuming an estimated 45 hours of preparation. The team figured they needed to log a find every three minutes and 22 seconds to hit the record. Searching time was limited to one minute once they stopped the car and considering that, it’s remarkable the team logged only 23 DNFs for the journey.

Their odyssey started near Denver airport with five “warm-up” caches just before the midnight kickoff. The team logged its 100th find at 5:30 A.M. By then, they had already battled swarms of grasshoppers who thought their car was a nifty place to hang out in the darkness of night. All day long, our heroes suffered through heat and dehydration in the process of traveling 471 miles.

“There were no bathrooms,” ventura_kids told us. “Anytime somebody needed to go, I’d say, ‘Cache is on the left, bathroom is on the right.’"

Everyone had a role. Ventura_kids has a near photographic memory for routes, so he did the driving. EMC posted constant updates on Facebook and Twitter. F0t0m0m was in charge of music (and decided on country music just to annoy EMC, who sings mostly classical music and opera for a living).

“We discarded the multi-stage caches and worked every puzzle we could,” ventura_kids said. “We got rid of the ones that even looked like a problem. I had a map with approach drawings on the left and departure drawings on the right. As we approached a cache, the others would pour out of the car, with Jim saying, ‘I’ve got the left!’ and Elin saying, ‘I’ve got the right!’ I’d turn around and be ready to depart when they got back.”

Fatigue nearly robbed the cachers of their record, as the hours passed. “You don’t realize how tired and emotional you’re going to be,” ventura_kids said. He told jokes to lighten up the crew, even when he was feeling the stress of the day. EMC sang for her friends. Everyone was energized by the prospect of setting a new record, and in the end, they were rewarded with a new world record to their name. Will their feat stand for long? No doubt there are others plotting right now to make sure it doesn’t. (In fact, as we went to press, word came in that a team in Sweden had logged over 500 caches in 24 hours!)

What Is Power Caching?
Power caching is an extreme version of the game that can push participants to and past exhaustion. An outing typically consists of a frantic run through an area of dense placements with the goal of finding each container in just a few minutes. The activity usually involves teams of people, but even individuals have been known to log well over 100 finds in a single day.

In the process of researching this book, we were treated to a power cache excursion by a team of two Austin, Texas-area veterans—The Outlaw, who organized the day, and TreyB. (See “Power Caching Journal” following this chapter.) We logged 102 finds for the day, but we had several advantages, including the fact that The Outlaw had found nearly all of the targets previously and had hidden a third of them. The adventure took an exhausting 15 hours and instilled in us profound respect for the enthusiasts who power cache on a regular basis. These people are just as nuts as the extreme cachers.

There is little elegance about power caching. Difficult or cryptic hides are usually avoided in the interest of time. Participants seek to maximize the number of easy-to-find caches and to optimize their route so that a minimum amount of time is spent in the car. A one-day power caching excursion may be preceded by two months of planning. Veterans say the activity is physically draining and can be monotonous, since it focuses on the least-challenging caches to find. Do it for variety, they recommend, but only in moderation.

Still, the act of running up numbers can be exhilarating. Among the more than 20,000 finds that EMC of Northridge, CA has rung up were 300 on July 4, 2007, with Andy and Jen Perkins (Team Perks) and Bill Varney (Cachepal) in a manic run in Porterville, California.

Ventura_kids (Steve and Sandy) usually power cache with Jim Hoffman (f0t0m0m). Steve drives to the cache in his trademark Jeep. He’s the driver because he has an incredible photographic memory and knows the routes to and all the details of all the caches he’s ever sought. (This is a truly impressive and savantish feat when you consider Steve’s found over 18,000 geocaches.)

Once they get to the location, Steve starts counting down from 40. By the time he gets to 10, f0t0m0m or Sandy has usually found the cache. F0t0m0m hands the cache to Sandy, who retrieves the log as she and f0t0m0m rendezvous with Steve. They each attach log stickers, rehide the cache, and jump in the car for their next destination.

Meanwhile, Steve has started the Jeep up again and is ready to head to the next location. Sandy is the second one in the car and Steve keeps an eye on his dashboard for a signal that the right rear door has closed, indicating f0t0m0m is back in the car. When he sees that dashboard indicator, he goes. He doesn’t turn around to check, as that would mean wasted time. Of course, this means that sometimes they leave without f0t0m0m being in the car. Usually Sandy notices this and yells at Steve to stop.

As for the day’s timing, Sandy keeps the time for the group’s trip, and she’s as severe as a drill sergeant: The rule is if they don’t get 10 caches each hour in the morning, then the team doesn’t get to have lunch. “We created the seven-minute limit to ensure we never waste too much time,” Steve says. “We start our little timers [originally an actual timer; now it’s just Steve counting backwards] as we exit the Jeep, and if the cache hasn’t been found when the alarm goes off, we leave.”

WE4NCS agrees it’s necessary to have a plan when power caching. A 61-year-old who goes on regular power caching trips with Roger Dillard (rldill, age 55) and Granpa Alex (age 63), WE4NCS loads power caching trips from GSAK (once he’s filtered them for ease and cluster locations) to Microsoft Streets and Trips. Then he plugs in his portable USB GPSr and tracks the car’s progress on his laptop, in addition to tracking the progress on their GPS units.

Using this method, the team can alter their plan while on the go and get the most caching bang for their time. They’ve been known to cache for 40 hours at once without stopping to sleep. What possesses 60-year-old men to do this? “It’s better than sitting in front of the television!” WE4NCS says. The team plays so often together that they’ve created a name for themselves—Team CHS (Cache-Hunting Studs).

Why Would Anyone Want to Power Cache?
Doesn’t that mad dash betray the Zen of the game? It’s true that the goal of traditional caching and power caching do not mesh. Traditional caching is usually about a good walk, fresh air, discovering a new park or trail, the thrill of the hunt for that one elusive hiding spot, the details you write in your log, and that one smiley that means so much because of the experience.

Power caching is about getting there and moving on. It’s a numbers game in which your eyes only leave the GPSr long enough to fix on Ground Zero. It is hours of heart-pounding, focused intensity. “When you’re power caching, you can’t be bothered whether the sun is shining,” says dgreno. “Just make sure you carry big flashlights and plenty of extra batteries.” This explains his penchant for 36-hour continuous power runs.

Power cachers often have a goal, such as 100 finds in 8 hours or 500 in a week. They pay the price: Ankles and hamstrings throb the next morning from climbing into and out of the car and dashing between targets. Logging finds can be a chore when you can’t really think of anything special to say about your 78th cache after 11 hours. And that one smiley that means so much in traditional geocaching is only a means to an end in power caching—that final count for the day.

But power caching is actually more than numbers. It’s about setting and pursuing goals and pushing yourself to the limit. It’s about competition with others, personal records, and new targets to shoot for. Ask a power caching veteran to tell you about her personal records and she’ll usually rattle off a string of numbers, dates, and locations, frequently recalling memorable finds along the way.

Power Caching the USA
When elite geocachers conspire, weirdness ensues.

It took a team of three geo-fanatics—dgreno, Alamogul, and Roger Seaman (retiredprof)—to dream up the most remarkable geocaching story we heard during our months of research and scores of interviews. The team, which has more than 68,000 finds between them, geocached across all 50 U.S. states in just 10 days. Their odyssey covered 12,000 miles, not including the two plane flights needed to log Alaska and Hawaii. It was a masterpiece of planning and execution.

The goal was to qualify for and grab the “Found 50 States, I’m Going to Disneyland!” cache (GCRFNN), which they nabbed in world record time. In fact, like DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, their record is likely to stand for a long time.

The adventure began in San Francisco, where the team rented a new car with less than 200 miles on the odometer. They drove north to Seattle, logging Oregon along the way. Their flight to Alaska was longer than their stay there: just three hours on Alaskan soil.

The plan was to take the northern route east and the southern route west. There would be no sightseeing or lounging by the pool for these men on a mission. Dgreno had been planning for two months.

The goal wasn’t big numbers. In fact, the players set out to log only two finds per state in order to make sure that at least one was recognized. As it happened, they finished with 350.

Among the time-saving shortcuts they employed:
•    Staying on interstate highways to maximize speed.
•    Renting rooms at the cheapest hotels with Internet access every other day to shower,—“so we could stand to be in the same car with each other,” according to dgreno.
•    Equipping the rental car with power converters and plenty of batteries to keep computers and GPSr units humming 24/7 without stop.
•    Alerting cachers along the route of their arrival so that events could be planned—and logged—as they passed through.

Somewhere in New Mexico near the end of the trip, Alamogul slammed his laptop shut with a pen still lying on the keyboard. The screen was destroyed. He called a friend in California to say that the trio would reach Albuquerque two hours later. Could the friend please find some local cachers to lend them time on their computer?

They shortly got a note from a family of Albuquerque enthusiasts who said they’d be happy to meet the team. Dgreno, Alamogul, and retiredprof pulled up at 6 A.M. to find a hot breakfast and a warm computer waiting. They downloaded the missing data, ate, bid adieu to the family, found a cache on the front lawn of the house, and hit the road again.

The Alamogul laptop tragedy aside, the trip went surprisingly smoothly. Returning to California ten days after they started, the team boarded a plane for Hawaii, cached for a few hours and flew back to complete the run. Disneyland, here we come!

Oh, we forgot to mention one big cost-saving tip: renting a car. The bill for the 12,000-mile journey was just $250 (plus gas, of course), thanks to unlimited-miles pricing. The only unfortunate part: The team discovered only on the final day that they had had access to satellite radio all along.

By TheAlabamaRambler

TheAlabamaRambler is Ed Manley, husband to GeoRose (Teresa), father of five wonderful humans, grandfather of two more, and an avid geocacher.

Now retired after a decade in the US Navy followed by 28 years of owning and operating Knowledge Management Systems, an IT consultancy specializing in Workflow Analysis and Business Process Improvement, Ed now has the time to pursue his hobbies: Fishing, Geocaching and Ham Radio... the order of importance changes daily!

He is also W4AGA, an Extra-class Amateur Radio Operator with a passion for serving the public through volunteer disaster-relief preparedness and response. Active as a Communicator and Disaster Relief Chaplain in the Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief, American Red Cross (Shelter Manager and ARCHIE Team Lead), the Salvation Army Team Emergency Relief Network (SATERN), Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES AEC - Jefferson County Assistant Emergency Coordinator and OES - Operational Emergency Station) and Assisatant Director of the Zamora Shriners Ham Unit, he can be found on HF daily on 3.965 and on VHF on the Birmingham Amateur Radio Club (BARC) repeater on 146.88.

If you have any interest whatsoever in serving and giving back to your community, saving lives and taking part in the wonderful community of amateur radio please visit http://w4aga.com to learn about the many volunteer opportunities.

Ed is the Editor-In-Chief (sounds high-fallutin, don't it?) of the free online geocaching e-zine The Online Geocacher. He can be contacted via email at mailto:TheAlabamaRambler@gmail.com or by phone at 205-914-6814 from 7 a.m. to Midnight CDT.

73 de W4AGA

Comments(2):

1. It is great to see diversity in caching styles. The wife and I did one power trail but found it wasn't the kind of fun we were looking for. I won't climb or dive, but I'm old. This story proves caching has something for everyone.

   Saturday, May 08, 2010 Marvin

2. Power Geoaching

   I knew power caching was grueling, but now that I know just how grueling, I think I'll leave it to the experts!

   Thursday, June 10, 2010 Kryptic