Featured Article - May 2009

Pam Rhodes and her son, Daniel, soak up the sun during a geocaching excursion near Las Cruces.

Cache? Check. Charge!

From down south to up north, New Mexico's landscape is dotted with GPS markers. They're the work of geocachers, a group of high-tech treasure hunters who use Global Positioning System devices to explore the state's wilds. Mike Smith takes you on an excursion with these family-friendly explorers.

Photography by Megan Walker

The sun’s first rays slide across the outer walls of our little tent, flooding its hexagonal interior with a muted, greenish light, and pulling me blinking out of dreams. My three-year-old daughter, Anodyne, is lying next to me. The creosote-rich desert of southern New Mexico—gray jagged mountains, stony hills, grama grass, cactus—is just outside our tent’s slanted walls.

Our night in the desert has been a restless one, yet we’ve slept well enough to still feel excited about the day ahead: Anodyne in her tentatively eager three-year-old way, me in mine. Yesterday, we drove down from our home in Albuquerque to meet a family of geocachers—modern-day treasure hunters—and to see what they could help us find.

Now we drive back into Las Cruces to meet our guides, the Rhodes family. Arlis, the family patriarch, is a police officer. Pam, his wife, teaches fourth grade just south of town. With their children—Kylie, eight, and Daniel, five—they’re known in the geocaching community as “MiMi’s Mob,” after a childhood nickname of Kylie’s. We sit with them over lunch in a booth of a chain diner as they tell us about their hobby.

Geocaching, I learn, updates the idea of scavenger hunting for the digital age. On every continent, in more than 100 countries, and in every American state including New Mexico, are hidden “caches”—ammo cans, lidded containers, plastic bags full of miscellany—secreted away among trees and rocks, ready to be found by anyone who cares to make the effort. All a person need do to locate a cache is visit a geocaching website (www.geocaching.com, for example), find the latitude and longitude of a cache, and enter those coordinates into a handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) unit. The receiver connects with a network of satellites orbiting Earth to deduce the user’s location, and in which direction the user should move to reach the cache.

Where you can go

There are geocaches in more than 200 countries worldwide and all 50 states. It's no surprise that every county in New Mexico now contains at least one cache. To find those closest to you, enter your zip code at www.geocaching.com.

Get involved in the New Mexico State Parks Geocaching Challenge, in which geocachers attempt to find a chace in each of New Mexico's 34 state parks. Last year, 14 cachers or cacher teams successfully completed the challenge. To get started, visit www.nmgeocaching.com and www.nmparks.com

New Mexico geocachers created their own group on Yahoo! Join the discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nm_geo/

-Brandon Call

In the diner, Arlis Rhodes sets up his laptop between trays of deep-fried appetizers to show us the whereabouts of two caches, each identified by a marker on a digitized map. He types the coordinates into his receiver, and within an hour we’re wandering into the desert, obeying a digital arrow on the receiver’s screen. When I tell my daughter we’re using a “treasure-hunting machine,” her eyes widen in curiosity.

Soon, we come to a large soaptree yucca, its trunk thatched with spiky yellowed shag. Its many arms, bristling with green spears, hide a metal container in which we find the treasure: some used plastic toys. A cacher may remove an item from a cache, but geocaching etiquette dictates that she or he must leave something in its place. Anodyne takes a ball and leaves a glowstick. There is also a notebook, which we sign to register that we’ve located the cache, and a paper explaining what the cache is, in case it’s found by a muggle—a term for non-wizards taken from the Harry Potter series, and used by geocachers to describe non-geocachers.

Otherwise, geocachers have a vocabulary and subculture all their own. Some do little other than drive around the country in search of caches. Rock climbers and scuba divers set up caches that require special skills and equipment to reach. And then there are those, such as the Rhodes family, who set up “event caches,” at which all geocachers in a given region—say, southern New Mexico—meet at certain coordinates at a certain time for a party. The Rhodes family also sometimes caches “travel bugs”—numbered dog tags attached to various items, which travel from cache to cache and whose registered serial numbers can be tracked via the Internet.

Many geocachers have special geocaching identities, and compete to be the first to reach a new cache, even if they have to hunt at night or during a storm. And more New Mexico geocaching events are springing up all the time, such as Cache In Trash Out IV—a quarterly event in which geocachers restore the environment by picking up trash; May’s Third Annual NMGeocaching Travel Bug Workshop, hosted by the Justice League of New Mexico; and June’s Seventh Annual geocaching event during Heritage Days in Portales.

The Rhodeses tell me all this on our second hike, along a winding trail to Dripping Springs, where water seeps from the gray rock at the base of the Organ Mountains, east of Las Cruces. As they hike, Anodyne and Kylie become friends; they hold hands, chase Daniel, and rest beneath junipers. We walk steadily closer to the mountains, past prickly pears bubbling out of from stone walls, lichen-patched boulders, and clusters of wood and stone buildings—remnants of a picturesque mountain resort built in the 1870s. In 1917, that resort at La Cueva became a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, and most of its remaining buildings stand on stilt-like supports above the uneven terrain at this historic geocaching destination.

Rising above them like a tombstone, a skyscraper-sized slab of granite dwarfs these tilting traces of civilization. As we move away from the ruins and farther into the canyons, the receiver’s arrow leads us to a limbless, half-hollow tree, inside of which we find a resealable plastic bag—the cache.

As Anodyne, Kylie, and Daniel trade toys for some removable tattoos and a rubber centipede, Kylie tells me that although finding the treasures is fun, for her the best part is hiking with her family to places she probably would never discover. The treasures are neat, she says, but the mountains desert, and time with her family—those are neater.

That night, Anodyne and I camp in a motor home behind the Rhodeses’ house—they are, we discover, among the nicest people ever. On the way back to Albuquerque, I think more about how technology so often takes us out of the world—our TVs show us not the world as it might be or even is, but a substitute world, reduced to a flat rectangle sandwiched between advertisements. Geocaching, on the other hand, gets people out into the world to see it for themselves.

True, wandering around the desert squinting at a tiny electronic screen does add a cyber aspect to the outdoor experience, but on our trip, that technology has led us to two beautiful new places, introduced us to a wonderful family, allowed Anodyne to make a new friend, and given me a chance to spend time with my daughter.

Lead on, technology. Just give me the coordinates.

Mike Smith, author of Towns of the Sandia Mountains, writes about New Mexico’s strangest history and lore for www.mystrangenewmexico.com. He and his family live in Albuquerque.

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