Dec. 12 — 12/12/12 — was a major date for geocachers around the world.
An estimated 70,000 cachers fanned out or attended an event that day, each of them earning a digital souvenir from geocaching.com for their efforts. Here’s a look at their day:
If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to try geocaching, maybe Saturday’s International Geocaching Day is it.
Take part in any of the more than 250 organized events — like the GeoTrain through Oil Creek State Park — and you can earn a souvenir on your Geocaching.com profile page.
Call (814) 676-1733 to register or get information about the GeoTrain.
If you’re looking for a bit of socialization to go along with your geocaching adventures, try one of these upcoming events:
1. Allegany State Park GeoBash VII, May 19, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Head to Camp Allegany at Allegany State Park, N.Y., for the region’s largest caching event of the season.
2. RimRock Bash Geomeet, May 27, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Meet at Kinzua Beach along the Allegheny Reservoir to start your hunt for temporary and permanent caches.
3. Kinzua Cachers June Camp-O-Rama and 1K Picnic, June 23, 5-8 p.m.
Break out the GPS unit for Saturday’s annual Geocache Bash at Presque Isle State Park.
As many as 12 temporary caches and four new permanent caches will be hidden for the event, which starts with registration at 9:30 a.m. the cookhouse pavilion at Water Works (coordinates 42 08.993 W 080 07.997 for the techies). The hunt starts at 10 a.m.
Cost is $3, which includes one data sheet for recording each cache’s code. Preregistration is not required.
Bob and Sandy Bridge, of Punxsutawney, earned the first North Country Trail GeoTrail commemorative medallion.
The retired couple logged 50 caches over five days on a 52-mile stretch of the NCT through the Allegheny National Forest. They were presented with the medallion July 2.
The geotrail was launched June 1. It features 100 caches, each hidden about one mile from the last, over the 100-mile stretch of the NCT in the Allegheny National Forest chapter’s section of the trail from the New York border to south of Marienville.
The geotrail is a collaborative effort North Country Trail Association, the Allegheny National Forest Chapter of the NCTA, geocaching.com. and opencaching.com.
Keith Klos, right, presents Sandy and Bob Bridge, of Punxsutawney, with the first North Country Trail GeoTrail commemorative medallion. Klos is president of the North Country Trail in the Allegheny National Forest chapter.
GeoWoodstock IX is just days away, just in case you wonder later this week who all those folks are with handhelds at the Warren County Fairgrounds.
Registration is closed, but organizers say you’re still welcome to stop in and check out the world’s largest gathering of cachers.
A 75-cache geotrail along the Great Lakes Seaway Trail — a National Scenic Byway — has been renewed for 2011.
Cachers who find 10 treasures in any of the five regions from the Ohio/Pennsylvania border to Massena, N.Y., earn a collectible coin.
Get more details here.
Organizers set out this spring to place a series of geocaches along the Great Lakes Seaway Trail, which runs 518 miles along the Pennsylvania and New York freshwater shorelines.
Now there are 64 caches in place, giving rabid geocachers one more goal to chase: Getting their geotrail logbooks validated after finding 10 caches in any of the trail’s five regions.
Read more about the geotrail, and pick up your Lake Erie Region logbook at the Tom Ridge Environmental Center, 301 Peninsula Drive.
One of the pleasures of spending time in the outdoors is getting lost.
For some that means getting gone, vamoosing, being somewhere else. And those all are good things. Especially vamoosing.
But getting lost sometimes means truly getting lost — taking the path less traveled, followed by the road never before seen and the trail that really isn’t there. Those efforts invariably lead to places and sights you’ve never before encountered and make your world at once a little bigger and all the more unique.
Some of you will want to make a mark on your calendar. The non-Muggles among you will more likely plot their coordinates instead for the world’s largest geocaching-related event, GeoWoodstock IX, coming to Warren County in July 2011.
Geocachers from around the world are invited to the gathering July 2, 2011, that will be headquartered at Warren County Fairgrounds in Pittsfield.
Northwestern Pennsylvania is rife with caches — hidden containers whose latitude and longitude are recorded and uploaded to sites such as geocaching.com, where cachers download the details and head out to find the treasures. Some are simple; some are far trickier finds than one would believe.
Cachers come to the event will undoubtedly go in search of the thousands of caches that exist in Erie, Crawford, Venango, Forest, McKean and other counties. But they’ll also get a healthy menu of seminars, giveaways, geocoin trading, travel bug swaps and food and live music.
GeoWoodstock VIII on July 3 in Carnation, Wash., was expected to draw some 4,000 cachers to the Pacific Northwest.
