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Courtesy Karen Heywood
McKinley |
You probably wouldn’t give
us a second look: a mother and daughter strolling
through campus on a cloudless Stanford spring day. Two
generations of alumnae enjoying an afternoon on the
Farm.
But today, we are not your typical alums. Incognito,
we blend in with students, staff and visitors as we
make our way across campus. Our mission requires stealth:
we have come seeking hidden treasure.
We begin our hunt near the Cantor Arts Center—Andy
Goldsworthy’s serpentine Stone River sculpture is our first landmark. Small electronic gadgets
concealed in our palms beep to give us guidance. We
steal among bikes, cars and sightseers, careful not
to attract attention. We peer among trees, rocks, shrubbery.
Suddenly, it catches our eye....
What is this high-tech, undercover treasure hunt? It’s
called “geocaching.”
Using only hand-held global positioning systems and
an Internet site devoted to the hobby (geocaching.com),
players like us follow satellite coordinates and online
clues—and move among the uninitiated—to
find hidden containers all over the world, including
at Stanford.
Caches may be tiny—35 mm film canisters, for
example—with only room for a visitors’ log;
others are bigger, with kitschy or collectible items
for trading. According to geocaching guidelines, they’ve
been placed carefully, without harm to the landscape.
If you’ve done it right, your cache never should
be seen by a non-geocacher. Some are easy-to-find “cache-and-dashes”;
others require ingenuity and perseverance to locate,
whether nestled among tree roots, tucked into squirrel
holes, stowed behind posts or even suspended off bridges.
Geocaching has been gathering momentum since its inception
in 2000. For many enthusiasts it’s a weekend hobby;
for some a competitive sport. More than 300,000 caches
exist in 222 countries, hidden by “owners”
who place the containers, maintain their contents and
write the corresponding online clues.
More than 300 caches are located within five miles
of Stanford. About two dozen of those are on campus,
nestled in the shadows of red tile roofs, beneath palm
trees, in the Foothills, among sculptures and statuary.
Geocachers come to find Stanford’s caches nearly
every day. Some make a quick grab or two while they’re
visiting for another reason; others make dedicated trips.
Chances are, unless you’re geocaching yourself,
you’d never know they were in your midst.
At our first find near Stone River—revealing
exactly where would betray a fundamental tenet of the
game—the geocache is a small, well-camouflaged
Tupperware container. Like most caches, it contains
a log book (cachers must document their find in person
as well as on the corresponding web page) and tradable
tchotchkes. My mother, Carolyn Cox Heywood, ’72,
MA ’72, an avid but amateur cacher (she’s
found 215) leaves a magnetic tic-tac-toe game and takes
a Canadian coin. I leave a California quarter and take
a moose finger puppet. We consult our GPS devices. Good
news: another cache awaits us just a short walk away.
With only coordinates and often purposely sparse web
clues, a geocacher never knows exactly what she’ll
find at a geocache site. (Clues like “Don’t
get ‘stumped,’” or “Pay attention
to where you sit” may or may not assist the observant
cacher’s quest.) But while the caches and their
contents can be intriguing, the true rewards are the
places the search takes you.
“Prickly Garden,” our next Stanford cache
site, is a case in point. Although the cache is cleverly
hidden in the Arboretum, its star attraction—and
indeed, its inspiration—is a magnificent and little-known
30,000-square-foot cactus garden several paces off.
Commissioned by the Stanfords in the mid-1880s, it fell
into neglect during the 1920s, and has been slowly renovated
by volunteers since 1998.
We find caches hidden in or near the Papua New Guinea
sculpture garden near Roble Hall, near the Red Barn
and at the site of a former Ohlone village.
A cache near Maya Lin’s Timetable sculpture
in the Science and Engineering Quad requires math skills
and close attention to the installation’s details.
And to find “Leland’s Curios,” players
must visit four objets d’art and use numbers found
there to complete coordinate sets leading to the container.
“It’s a great way to spend a couple hours
on a bike ride on campus,” says cache owner Mark
Stein, MS ’84, who created it to introduce geocachers
to some of Stanford’s lesser-known art offerings.
(Want to know which? Break out your GPS.)
Not every cache ends with a physical container. “Virtual
caches” require players to solve puzzles or answer
questions to earn the find. One such cache at Rodin’s Gates of Hell asks you to unscramble an anagram
using information at the coordinates, and e-mail your
answer for credit.
Geocachers at Stanford include students, staff and
faculty. PHD candidate Teresa Miller, MS ’02,
who caches under the name “PrincessIchi,”
has found nearly 700 geocaches and hidden several of
her own in grad-student haven Escondido Village. Tom
Cramer, ’94, associate director for digital library
systems and services, owns 26 caches (including four
on campus), has found more than 1,200 and keeps a list
of 1,000 nearest unfound caches handy in his Palm. “E-T
Explorers”—computer science professors Alex
Aiken and Jennifer Widom and their kids, Tim, 11, and
Emily, 9—own four campus-area caches.
Then there’s Dave Sprecher, a.k.a. “Nurse
Dave,” patient-care manager at Stanford’s
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. He and his
wife, Becky, who met in a geocaching-themed Internet
chat room, turned their 2004 wedding into an “event
geocache.”
“The geocaching community . . . had become our
community of friends. So instead of inviting everyone
to our wedding, we thought we might as well make it
[a cache],” says Sprecher, who has more than 1,500
finds. As with all geocaches, the couple posted coordinates
for their Saratoga, Calif., wedding on geocaching.com,
and welcomed any cacher to attend and earn credit for
the find. Many of the guests were cachers, who slipped
away for a quick cache or two in the park where the
wedding was held. And then the newlyweds embarked on
a geocaching honeymoon in San Francisco.
No matter your level of intensity, geocaching changes
the way you experience the world, says Gigi Hallinger
Placone, ’79, who caches as “Stanford Gal”
and recently logged her 1,500th find during a campus
visit. “[Caching] makes you more observant of
your surroundings,” she says. “It brings
me the joy of appreciating what’s around me.” |
