RCK member and Program Committee Chair Kim Isenberg introduced RCK member David Williams, Executive Director of the 26-County Great Smoky Mountains Council of Scouting America, formerly the Boy Scouts. David spoke about one of his hobbies, geocaching. Geocaching has been described as the world’s largest outdoor treasure hunt. It is an outdoor recreational activity in which participants use global positioning system receivers or mobile devices and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called geocaches, at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world.
With a free geocaching account at geocaching.com, you can join millions of other participants in geocaching. A geocache is a container, ranging in size from very small to something in the nature of a large ammunition box, that typically includes a logbook that participants sign when they find it. They put the geocache back where they found it for someone else to find.
The geocaches are hidden by people involved in playing the game There are presently over 3,000,000 geocaches located around the world. There are rules on the geocaching.com website regarding placing geocaches and standards to be followed in hunting, finding and replacing them. David described geocaching as using multi-million dollar satellites to find hidden Rubbermaid containers.
Rules for placing geocaches include that they cannot be put on military bases or on federal property. There are, however, geocaches in public parks, including national parks. In Tennessee, you cannot put a geocache in a cemetery. Rules include that geocaches cannot be buried underground, you must put them back where you found them, and pick up trash around the geocache site. On the geocaching.com website, geocache locations are rated from 1 to 5 stars for difficulty and terrain. There is now a Scouting USA geocaching merit badge.
There is a Cache Across America program that has a specific designated geocache in each state. David and his wife Amy have found the Cache Across America geocaches in 38 states. Geocaching has turned out to be a very useful and interesting family activity for the Williams family. His children, now 22 and 19, have participated with David and Amy over the years.