Land Rovers,
Mud & Treasure Hunting
The
lineup includes Christians Discovery, Tonys Defender & Jacks Discovery
Off-roading
and Geocaching are a perfect match for outdoor adventure
Story and photos by Jack W. Peters
Members of the local Oregon
Trail 4Wheel Drive Association gave us a heads up that they recently placed
a Geocache in the Shotgun Park off-road recreational area. This
is an area we have been wanting to explore anyway, so trying to find their
stash hidden up a technical trail was the perfect excuse, (as if we needed
one), to get some guys together and head for the hills.
Photo by Eric Gwaltney
It cant
be that deep right?
GPS now a sport?
Geocaching
is a new high-tech treasure hunting game invented after the government
removed Selective Availability from GPS in May of 2000. (That
was the scramble device that made the receivers inaccurate up to 100 meters.)
Now that accuracy has been improved to a few meters, it is now possible
to provide coordinates for treasure hunting. The sport was invented in
Oregon, and is now played around the world. Enthusiasm for the game has
quickly spread as participants combine their love of the great outdoors
with the use of high-tech GPS. The goal is to locate hidden treasure
from Latitude/Longitude coordinates found on the Geocaching.com
web site. The treasure consists of neat stuff in zip lock bags, stored
away in hidden GI ammo cans. Treasure seekers take something, leaving
something, and then sign the caches logbook.
Shotgun Park is
a designated OHV area just north of the Eugene/Springfield area outside
of Marcola, Oregon. Although is area is practically right in our own
backyard, it has gone unexplored, at least by us anyway. This has been
a popular area for dirt bikers for many years. We thought there must
be some good double track trails up there somewhere. In our case, we
had no idea where we were going. It was one of those great days of off-road
driving where we were on a mission, but it no hurry and ready to explore
any no-name trail that happens to take off from the roadway.
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The area was hit hard by heavy
windstorms the week before. There were trees down everywhere that required
driving over the logs. Not a problem driving over them, except I think
it was a sharp branch that ripped a hole in my rear Mud-Terrain. This
was discovered on a rather steep hill. We had to park the truck sideways
on the trail to jack up the back. The area includes a large bowl with
lots of steep trails to practice driving up and down hills. There is
a rock-crawl garden from the annual Iron Truck Challenge that is
held at this location. Most of all, there is lots and lots of mud. Within
all of this four-wheeling paradise, there are also lots of large rocks.
I found one on a hill climb. Tony in the Defender, made it look so easy.
He must have picked a better line than I did because I hit a rock the
size of a TV. No problem, except the steering wheel was now pointing
in the wrong direction from a bent tie-rod.
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Tonys
Defender made the climb look easy.
I tried it to only find a boulder resulting
in serious tie-rod abuse.
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Cruising down narrow trails covered with
fallen trees from a resent windstorm.
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N 44º 15 8.4 W 122º 51
12.3 UTM 10 T 0511703
E 4899689 N
Oregon Trail 4Wheel Drive Association
is working on plotting out some trails, including a rather technical one
they ran the week before. Club member and serious GPS enthusiast, David
Morris said the best way to find the trail was by searching for the cache,
that was hidden in the trees just off to the side.
The night before we found the
cache on the web titled Oregon Trail Club 1, on the www.geocaching.com
web site. We entered the coordinates in our GPS receivers, and printed
off a topographical map of the area from TopoZone.com. From the
look of the map, it appeared to be on top of a hill along the side of
a rough unimproved trail. And unimproved it was. Much of the trails
we found were narrow in a heavily forested area. Very scenic and muddy,
as they winded around hillsides. This was exactly what we were looking
for, besides we were getting closer to our target.
A check of the GPS receiver
indicated we were approaching the Geocache waypoint. We knew the target
was somewhere on top of the hill, so it was time to get out of the trucks
and have a look. The overhead tree cover was thick enough to reduce the
signal strength of the receivers. We lost some accuracy that prevented
us from walking right up to it, but that was the idea. The Jeep guys
didnt want to make it too easy to find. Eric who also had a GPS receiver,
and I wandered around the location, staring intently into the little gray
screens. The closest reading I could get was 49 feet. I used a compass
to get bearing, we knew we had to be close. Christian found it first,
an ammo can hidden under some moss in a large tree stump.
Jack,
little Eric, Tony, Eric & Christian
So what did we
snag for our efforts?
a solar emergency blanket and a cool Oregon Trial
Jamboree beer can holder. I left a couple business cards to cash
in for our new book, GPS Navigation Guide. It was a great way
to spend the day. Well be back again to find more treasure and maybe
even hide some of our own.
Geocaching is a great sport
for many of reasons. One, it gets our pasty white, out of shape arses
out from behind a computer screen, to actually enjoy the outdoors. Its
great for learning navigation skills because it requires the use of not
only GPS, but also the ability to read a map and compass. Most importantly,
its fun. What a great excuse to get family and friends outdoors to tromp
aimlessly throughout the wilderness in search of inanimate treasures.
Tips for Geocaching
- Remember to print out a
map from the Geocaching website.
- Check for clues in the level
of difficulty in reaching the cache.
- Bring a map of the area
and a compass.
- The most obvious route to
the cache on a map, may not be the most assessable.
- Do not expect a receiver
to direct you to the exact location.
- Depending on signal strength,
15 meters may be your closest reading.
- Give yourself more time
than you think to find the cache.
- There is now way to tell
how long or how difficult it will be to find the target until you get
there.
- Dont get stuck in the woods
running out of daylight without a flashlight.
- Do not forget to bring something
to leave in the cache. It could be almost anything that someone might
find valuable. Seal it up in a zip-lock bag.
- Respect the land by Treading
Lightly and leaving no trace.
- Carry along a garbage bag
to make it easy to pack out any trash.
Copyright
© 2002 Jack W. Peters. All
Rights Reserved
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