Geocaching in the Rockies

Two years ago, my Daughter E, phoned and asked if we would like to try a new sport called Geoching. Having absolutely no idea what this would entail, my wife agreed.
Apparently, We were going to borrow a GPS , which we had never used and going to be going out to the Rockies to do a scavenger hunt of sorts.
I had a picture in my mind , of us blindly bumbling around looking for this geocache in the middle of nowhere.
"No, no" said my wife. We will be given co-ordinates or the geocache and we just use the GPS to find them. "Uh Huh".I told her I didn't think wandering around in the middle of the bush in the Rockies with absolutely no idea what we were looking for was a good idea. Of course, I lost out on that point. We would be on hiking trails and no geocache was more than 20 feet off the trail.That's better but what is a geocache?
A geocache is a hidden receptacle that contains a diary of some sort and possibly some small items that can fit inside. You may remove one item and , if you wish. replace the item with something else that you have brought with you.
Off we set for the Rockies and just east of Hinton we started looking for our first cache. E had put in our co-ordinates and the ones we were looking for and off we set. It didn't take us more than 10 minutes to find the first cache. Inside were various items and we took out one item and added something that we had brought with us. E signed our names and date in the diary book and out we
went to the car to set off for our next cache. This was going to be easy I thought and really couldn't understand what all the fuss about this great new sport.
We found a campground for the night close to where we would be starting our "hunt" for the next cache in the morning.
When we were ready ,after a good night's sleep,E put in the co-ordinates for the three caches we would be looking for that day. They were basically on the same trail on the same mountain. I thought we would be just going on a nice enjoyable hike. Off we went up the mountain on a very good hiking trail. The day was beautiful. Part way up E. told us that according to the information on the Internet, this was a miniature cache that we were looking for and so was going to be quite small. She even let me use the GPS and kept telling me that it was not a compass and not to use it as one. I finally got the hang of it and got us to what was supposed to be 20 feet of the cache. We started to look. Nope. not under that bush. Nope, not behind that. Remember, this is a small cache. start searching the trees. AHA! There it is. I'm pointing to it. It was a 35mm film case that the cacheur had drilled a hole in the tree for. He had glue the case in the hole, put in a slip of paper for the diary , put the top on the case, painted it the color of the tree and then glued a pine cone onto the top.YES! We had found a really a hard one. The next ones should be easy. The GPS indicated that we had to head up the mountain so off we went. After about 15 minutes, the GPS said we were getting farther away but we were still on the trail. E thought the cache w at the top of the mountain from the clues on the Internet so we kept hiking up and getting farther away according to the GPS. We thought maybe you have to go up and then down on a winding trail that would bring us out below where we were. That would bring us right to the co-ordinates we were looking for. To the top we went. No other trail down! HMMMM? Maybe we missed it somewhere. Down we went,watching for the co-ordinates very carefully. When we arrived at the "correct co-ordinates, we searched and searched. Couldn't find anything. We decided to find the third cache which proved to be surprisingly easy. We entered our name in the log book and put in an item we had brought with us. We decided not to take anything from this cache.
By this time it was about 4 o'clock so we decided to head back to the campground. We still couldn't figure out why we couldn't find the second cache. E decided to check the co-ordinates we should have been looking for. OH! OH! When the co-ordinates were first put into the GPS, one number was entered incorrectly. We recalibrated the GPS with the correct number and tried to figure out if we had bee at all close. YUP we had. The cache was at the top of the mountain within 100 yards of where we had been. NO, we didn't go back. It was a two hour climb up and we had others to look for the next day.
All in all it really was fun. By the time we got home we were hooked. We had seen parts of the Rockies and surrounding areas that we normally would not see or even think about looking for. There are some fantastic places hidden just out of sight and off the beaten track. We were so taken with the whole experience we even bought our own GPS so we wouldn't have to borrow one. If you want an interesting sport with great exercise ,try Geocaching. The caches are all over the world.