‘Geocacheing’ is good, real-life practice for GPS users

MAT-SU — In the past 10 years, the Global Positioning System has transformed many aspects of Americans’ day-to-day lives. It’s used for mapping, in construction, in agriculture, in transportation, in bank vaults and it’s the juice behind many Smartphone applications.

But perhaps no change brought to life by GPS was more dramatic than the one that greeted users the morning of May 2, 2000. That’s when the system opened its doors to broader civilian uses and GPS receivers transitioned to precise and useful tools overnight.

The next day, on May 3, 2000, a hobby was born that would cross international boundaries and unite citizens everywhere in a high-tech global treasure hunt.

History credits computer consultant and GPS enthusiast Dave Ulmer as the first person to hide a navigational target and challenge others to find it using the posted coordinates. He devised the Great American GPS Stash Hunt as a means to test the new system’s accuracy, according to a website devoted to the pastime, called geocaching.com.

Today, there are more than 1.5 million active geocaches and more than 5 million geocache hunters worldwide. To get started, go to geocaching.com and enter a U.S. ZIP code and the site will supply a list of caches in that area. Enter Wasilla’s ZIP code and 2,973 caches come up. Enter Palmer’s ZIP code and there are 2,894 caches.

The name of the game and the receivers used have changed, but the rules of the hunt are much the same today as when Ulmer hid the first geocache: “Take some stuff, leave some stuff.”

Here are the rules:

• When a cache is located, the treasure hunter may take something from the cache, but must leave something of equal or greater value.

• Record your find in the logbook included in the cache container.

• Log the find at geocaching.com.

GPS is all around us

GPS is actually how Steve Brown arrived in Alaska. He’s the Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension Service Agent for the Mat-Su and Copper River Districts. His resume lists his subject matter specialties as the twin geospatial technologies of the Global Positioning System and Geographic Information Systems as they relate to agriculture and the environment.

In simpler terms, he’s the guy who has helped the likes of Vander Weele Farms and Palmer Produce switch from driving their tractors by hand to having a GPS-guided unit do that work for them. In fact, Brown said Paul Huppert of Palmer Produce was the first farmer in Alaska to begin using GPS technology.

With the GPS system installed on a tractor, Brown said farmers can climb in the cab, flip the GPS unit on and it will drive the machine to plant the field, till or harvest crops.

“It is all around you in ways that you don’t even realize,” Brown said.

He still remembers the day in 1989 when he read about the first GPS receiver. “I remember thinking, ‘How can I convince my wife I need one of these?’” Brown said.

Then as luck would have it, a man walked through the door to his Cornell University Cooperative Extension office and said he wanted to experiment with uses for this new GPS technology, he said. In 1992, it was Brown who demonstrated to staff at Cornell that GPS could be used to steer a tractor around a field more accurately than a farmer’s hands.

“It’s literally taken us across the country since then,” Brown said. “It was my ticket to Alaska to help bring it to agriculture here.”

In the decade since he began experimenting with the technology, he’s attached GPS units to all kinds of things from his cat — he wanted to see where she was going in his neighborhood — to a unit to steer his lawn mower. He also has a SPOT locator for snowmachine and mountaineering trips and a GPS-enabled watch he said he’ll use while running marathons this weekend in Nevada and Idaho.

How GPS could kill you

Of all the classes offered through the local Cooperative Extension office, Brown said the most popular is a free class he teaches on learning to use a GPS receiver. About 900 people took the class last year, he said.

“GPS gets people killed on a pretty regular basis,” Brown said.

It’s not that the receivers themselves are dangerous. The danger comes from people buying the units, not reading the users manuals and then taking the units out into the wilderness and expecting to use it to find their way back to their starting point, Brown said.

Instead of really learning to use the unit, Brown said people figure out that most GPS receivers have a built in map function that will draw a line across the map from the point where you started.

But what hunters may not realize is that the unit has limited memory and when that’s full, it begins deleting the trail from the beginning.

“I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about hunters going out to the Kobuk Mountains about 70 miles from Bethel and not being able to find their way back,” he said. “GPS is also contributing to losing traditional means of navigation. Now when their batteries fail, they don’t know any of the local landmarks.”

Brown said he began teaching people to use GPS receivers after working with a group tasked by NASA and FEMA to map the debris field of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.

“We had tens of thousands of volunteers helping and we just assumed everyone knew how to use GPS,” he said. “We found out that not even the military knew how to use their system correctly.”

However, what’s not in the owner’s manual may be just as crucial as what is included, Brown said. In the event of a rescue attempt, users must know what model of the earth and what coordinate system they are using.

“It’s in so much of our lives and we don’t realize it,” he said. “It’s just when we start using it for hunting and stuff like that that we can get in trouble if we don’t understand how to use it properly.”

‘Truly the pinnacle’ of

technological innovation

Beginning in the fourth grade and continuing through high school, students in the Mat-Su Borough School District can learn about geospatial technologies. Thanks to a collaboration between the Mat-Su Career and Technical High School and its advisory group, the high school program is one of about 10 in the nation, Brown said.

He said geocacheing is the best way to learn how to use a GPS receiver. In fact, there is even a cache behind the Cooperative Extension office in Palmer that draws geocachers from around the world, Brown said.

“Geocacheing forces you to use your GPS in the same way as you would for real in the Alaska wilderness, he said.

When Brown climbed Denali last winter, he was wearing a GPS tracker. And Dec. 1 when he attempts to summit the 22,841-foot Aconcagua — the highest mountain in the Americas — 4-H Clubs across the U.S. will be following his progress via GPS. He said it will be part of a national 4-H Club GPS project, too.

“When you look at all the technical innovations humans have created GPS is truly the pinnacle,” Brown said.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.