It was my first time face-to-face meeting someone I’d met on an internet message board so I was kind of nervous. Skippermark (aka Mark) had suggested we meet in the parking lot of the Wendy’s on Airport Road in response to a query I’d posted on CCC (The CT Caching Community) about geocaching in Hartford. When it was time to meet up, I figured the guy getting out of a sporty-looking vehicle in an orange Columbia jacket must be him.

At Colt Park we parked on a side street near where a geocache was hidden. It was a bright and cold day in late fall and whistles sounded out from the field, where a men’s football game was happening. I’d never been to the park before. I was amazed at the idyllic expanse of grass and the huge awning in the center of the field sheltering an impressive pile of dirt. According to Mark, Peter Frampton once played there.

We were after the Colt Revolver, a 6-part series of caches hidden by someone by the name of “FDPercival” on the geocaching site that serves as a database for finding, hiding, and chatting about caching. Percival’s Revolver series is aptly named after the Colt firearm and the fact that in finding the caches (named the First Chamber, Second Chamber, etc) you form a circle around the perimeter of the park. Mark had entered the coordinates for the cache into his GPS already and it led us to a nearby street corner.

“It’s not where you’d think,” my guide said as we stood on the ordinary-looking streetcorner. I wasn’t quite sure what we were looking for. But Mark had already found the series, so the cache was pretty easy for me to find with his hints. There it was, high above us and almost out of arms’ reach – a flat red magnet stuck to the light pole, which people had signed in permanent marker.

Trust me, this was actually pretty exciting. There’s something cool about finding something hidden in (sort-of) plain view and seeing all the names of others who had found the cache gave me the feeling of digging up a time capsule. When Mark asked if I wanted to find another one, I was all for it.

Using additional clues on the caches in the Colt Revolver you find the coordinatese for a bonus cache, the location of which I promised not to reveal in this article, but it was pretty cool. At the bonus cache, which I’ll just describe as a large-ish container, Mark showed me the log book. The exuberant first entry:

2/12/08 FTF!!
Whoo hoo
Skippermark
Bubba42e
Thanks for the fun!

It turns out Mark and a friend had been the first to find (FTF) the cache. I had it easy with Mark helping me, but I imagine for a novice it could get tricky. GPS doesn’t always lead you exactly to the right spot, and caches can take many different forms.

Geocaches can be anything from that magnet we’d found to a toothpick container to a 35 mm film case to tupperware to an ammunition box to a hollowed-out stick. There are thousands of these things in Connecticut, many hidden in the woods, some in very unremarkable places (like every single Staples, Walmart and Cracker Barrel), and there are quite a few in Hartford.

FDPercival, a Hartford resident, has planted caches all over Hartford as a way to draw people to interesting sites and show those from outside the city what Hartford has to offer. He’s hidden them in many of the city’s parks. The names -  Goodwin Park Promenade, Hyland on the Rocks, A Slice at the Fork, One Rock on the Ridge, Hartford’s Camp Field – evoke the city’s history and give people a tangible way to connect with the land.

For instance, here’s the description of one that’s marked as easy, called A Slice at the Fork. It’s located at New Britain Avenue and Chandler Street on a tiny triangular park.

Here is a small pie-slice shaped patch of land next to a fork in a major Hartford avenue. It is the site of a neglected Korean War memorial.
Thousands drive past this small park daily, but no one stops. I’m hoping that this cache will generate some visits.
Best place to park is on Chandler Street, alongside Maple Leaf Manor. Be sure to take in the close-up view of the Tricolor House, which has quickly become a local landmark.
This micro park gets a micro cache. It’s too small for a pencil.
Note: You won’t find it by climbing the tree!

(I bet people still climb the tree.) Sometimes the caches are multi-stage, such as the Goodwin Park one, which requires doing arithmetic using numbers from a plaque and GPS coordinates. While tricky, I imagine it makes victory sweeter.

As a proud resident of Hartford FDPercival (his real name is Fred) gets a kick out of some out-of-towners’ responses to the urban caches. He says he was “perversely proud” when a geocacher visiting Hartford freaked out online about how Colt Park was a death trap. (According to Fred, a Hartford cop told this guy he was risking his life going to Colt Park). In any case given some of the irrational comments I’ve heard from non-Hartfordites about the city, I can definitely see his point. Also I can see why using geocaching to introduce people to the cool sites in Hartford is such a good idea.

Apparently the caching trend has really taken off ever since GPS units have become more reasonable. Mark said that when he first started geocaching in 2002 there were less than 100 in the state. Now there are over 3000. At this point Mark’s hidden over 160 of them personally. He says some have been hidden in logs, and a lot in guard rails. Coincidentally, guard rails are used as hiding spots for all kinds of things. Mark explained to me how one time a confused cacher in New London found a bag of drugs feeling around for the geocache. (The cache was actually in a hollowed-out stick next to the guardrail) Another common caching place is pole skirts, those conical things around the bottom of poles, which can apparently be lifted up.

While spending your weekend lifting up pole skirts and knocking on hollowed-out logs may not sound like too much fun to some, many cachers use it as an excuse to get outside and (for urban caches in particular) discover history. Also it seems to bring a family together, to an extent. While Mark and I walked around the park his wife and son, who had come along, were hanging out back in the car.  They’d already done this cache before, and it was pretty cold outside. Mark explained that while the whole family initially was equally obsessed with caching, he’s sustained consistent interest the longest. But Mark, who has the air of a cheerful adventurer, said that fun, not competition, is his main motivation.

The caching obsession can sometimes drive people to do crazy things. For instance, one local woman I talked to named “Snowball’s Keepers” on the web (Kathi in real life) managed to set a caching record of finding one cache per day for 500 days! She explained that after she’d exhausted much of the ones in her area caching friends would plant them for her to find. And she also mentioned that her whole family used to be way way more into it than they are now.

Geocaching seems appealing because it’s a blend of outdoors with technological gadgetry.  Like all good hobbies, it’s a bit dorky. I noticed that people on the message board tend to call non-geocachers “Muggles.” Caching takes a granola pasttime like hiking or strolling and makes it just a little more purposeful. If you were ever into treasure hunts as a kid, I can see how you’d get sucked in.

Once it’s not so frigid outside, I’ll probably try to find some of the Hartford caches. And if I ever see someone furtively stashing something in a guard rail I now know what it is: a geocache! Or possibly drugs.

Photo credit: Matt Sargent.