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Hide it, and they will seek it
(Baltimore Sun, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 15--On a recent Sunday as Druid Hill Park was filling with cyclists, runners and folks just hanging out, Bill and Ellen Saks crunched through leaf litter, unobtrusively, they hoped, searching for the perfect spot to hide the park's first official geocache.
The middle-aged couple from Pikesville had filled a utility box with treasures: a lightstick, an Outer Banks key chain, a purple carabiner clip, a Chevrolet T-shirt and a Northrop Grumman mini-mouse pad. Most important was the waterproof log book in which treasure finders could record their visits.
Bill Saks selected an accessible site - not too deep in the woods - that involved a slight rearrangement of tree limbs and loose bark. After checking the coordinates on his hand-held Magellan GPS device, he concealed the cache, carefully camouflaged it, and named it Droodle Drop. (Droodle is Bawlamerese for Druid Hill.)
Now the site was ready to welcome the growing community of geocachers. Geocaching is 21st-century treasure hunting that uses a high-tech toy - a global positioning system receiver - to direct seekers toward a destination through satellite tracking. It's challenging and competitive, with many participants vying to be the first to discover a freshly created cache.
On the day Droodle Drop was posted on the Internet, John Stephens, known to geocachers as "Alpha Orionis," became the first to find it.
Less than an hour later, the second "finder" arrived: "There should be more caches in this park," "Eagleblazer" wrote. "Maybe I'll add one soon."
In less than a week, Droodle Drop acquired a caching history and provided common ground for folks who might not ordinarily connect: a secretary at the Torah Institute of Baltimore, a firefighter from Hampstead and a software engineer working in Hampden.
Such serendipity is magical for "Baltimore Bill" and "Knitting Ellen" Saks, one of Baltimore's premier geocaching couples. The Sakses, who have planted many caches around town, hope that Droodle Drop's Web posting will also entertain visitors with little-known history and local color.
If not, Bill Saks can give you at least 20 other reasons that geocaching is a splendid thing to try.
"It's something to do with a friend or your family ... or on a business trip," he reads from a list. "It's better than shopping. It's outdoors. It's exercise. It's a challenge. It's a neat 'tech' thing to do. You meet interesting people and there's a sense of community."
It's been known to pull computer geeks into the woods and coax suburbanites downtown. More than 200 caches are hidden within 10 miles of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Some are cleverly concealed along busy streets or near historic monuments. Others are under logs, in the cracks of stone walls and the hollows of trees. Some are "easy" finds, suitable for grandparents and grandchildren on an afternoon's outing. Others warn about feral cats and spiders.
Created six years ago by computer consultant Dave Ulmer as an adventure game for GPS users, geocaching works this way: "Hiders" conceal caches and post their coordinates on an Internet site, usually geocaching.com.
After downloading these coordinates, "seekers" use their GPS units to direct them to within 60 feet of a cache. At that stage, when satellite tracking isn't as accurate, the game switches over to a low-tech system of educated guessing.
When you find the cache, there are four basic rules: Take something from it, deposit something in it, write about it in the log provided - and leave the surrounding area no worse than you found it, Saks says.
"Geocaching gets me out of the house and going places I'd never go to," says John Stephens, a software engineer who works in Hampden and often "caches" on his lunch hour.
The first person to find Droodle Drop, Stephens learned about the site from geocaching.com. The Web site tracks the growth of the sport, lists locations of approved caches created by its subscribers and allows cachers to contact one another through pseudonyms.
On a recent day, the Web site posted information about more than 250,000 caches in 221 countries. Some cachers send in thoughts and comments about each cache they visit.
"Great area for a hide!" Stephens wrote on the Droodle Drop page. "Thanks Bill and Ellen for all your great hides ... I feel like an explorer chasing down the sites and history the two of you put together!"
In just a few years, the Sakses have found more than 700 caches and planted almost 40 of their own."Placing caches allows us to show off our favorite haunts," Bill Saks says. "It's a challenge to plant new caches in interesting places in novel containers."
Some of the containers, large enough to be filled with goodies, can be spied fairly quickly. Others require the sixth-sense skills of an uber-hunter: No bigger than your thumbnail, one of the Sakses' "nano" caches can barely accommodate a tiny scroll with the names of its finders.
Along with these "traditional" caches, the couple have also created "virtual" caches. Seekers must prove they have found these sites by providing information they could only know by visiting them. Another form of cache, known as a multi-cache, uses a series of finds linked by clues to lead to the ultimate cache site.
Skilled with all cache forms, the Sakses have created an idiosyncratic tour of greater Baltimore that showcases the city: The cultural hub near the Lyric Opera House, a mini-arboretum in Mount Washington, monuments in Druid Ridge Cemetery, and the water tower in Roland Park. More conventional sites on the itinerary include Federal Hill, the Shot Tower on Fayette Street and the waterfront in Canton.
Ellen Saks particularly likes their virtual caches at Fort McHenry and near Penn Station.
"You don't have to go chasing through the woods," she says.
The most fervent geocachers, though, often leave their comfort zones to rack up finds.
Take Drew Lombardo of White Marsh. A man who averages 300 finds a year as "Legendpilot," he once tackled an "extreme geocache" in Edgemere's Fort Howard Park with the help of some geocaching buddies.
Although the description of Psycho Urban Cache #10 warns of such environmental hazards as rats, broken liquor bottles and "pale and tattooed bored Gothic scene teenagers," Lombardo describes it as "a wonderfully under-maintained piece of American history."
"It was a seven-stage multi-cache that had you crawling through sewer tunnels as well as climbing walls," he says with surprising cheer. "I had to use ropes to climb and other special gear."
More often, Lombardo constructs highly artful caches and searches for others in the woods.
Robert Klimkiewicz Jr., former president of the Maryland Geocaching Society, also prefers the beauty and quiet seclusion of the woods, especially state parks. He avoids geocaching sites in shopping centers and other high-traffic spots that require him to appear inconspicuous while he's searching.
"Other people like the thrill of using stealth in a public area to avoid being seen," he says. "Not me. It always makes me way too self-conscious, even though I know I'm not doing anything wrong."
Bill and Ellen Saks don't mind acting a little sneaky. One of their best caching moments occurred on a main tourist drag in the French Quarter of New Orleans, pre-Hurricane Katrina. The challenge was to remove the hidden micro-cache from the top of a restaurant's menu board on Bourbon Street without being seen.
Saks pulled an old magician's trick: Pretending to brush something off the bottom of his left shoe with his right hand, he leaned against the board with his left hand, balancing himself, but also reaching onto a ledge to retrieve the film-canister-sized cache.
Sometimes, he says, you just have to use a distraction technique.
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