Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Sunday, October 21, 2007
Geocaching: A high-tech treasure hunt
 Steve and Donna Haas use their GPS to locate a container along the LaCrosse River near Riverside Park while geocaching in LaCrosse Saturday morning . Dick Riniker photo |
Dean Howe sauntered up to Donna and Steve Haas wearing a black leather jacket and speaking like a cowboy.
“I’m known for hiding some of the nastiest caches in the area,” Howe said.
“We’re scared of your caches,” Donna said. “We stay away.”
They were talking about geocaching, an activity in which people hide items, or caches, all over the world and others use handheld global positioning system, or GPS, receivers to find them.
At www.geocaching.com, geocachers download the latitude and longitude of the hidden items and later log their finds.
On Saturday, Howe and the Haases were participating in “Cache in La Crosse,” an ongoing event from Oct. 15 through Nov. 4 organized by the La Crosse Area Sports Commission.
Through the event, which is not an official geocaching.com event, Brian Meeter hopes to spark interest in local geocaching and get people outside.
“We need to show off this city,”
Meeter said. “The more we can do that, the more people will appreciate how beautiful we have it here.”
In their 15-month career, the Haases of Holmen have found 2,897 caches — from the Grand Canyon to a 2 a.m. find in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. They’re ranked 12th in Wisconsin for number of caches found.
“I’m about 600 feet away from it now,” Steve said Saturday morning, looking down at his GPS receiver as he walked on a trail behind the Oktoberfest grounds.
Some humans passed on bicycles. Steve said, “Morning,” walked across a bridge and noted people without homes live beneath it, then found a Tupperware container beneath a mossy piece of timber.
Bingo.
Donna, 58, wrote their geocaching name, “drhaas,” in the logbook, placed a golfball inside, and rehid the box.
After today, the two will have cached for eight days straight, with Steve, 59, spending six of them caching in Tennessee with his son-in-law.
“Our yard is going to heck,” Steve, 59, joked.
Saturday was the first time they’d met Howe in the flesh. Previously, they’d only known him by his geocaching name, “vtwinspin,” and cursed his often difficult-to-find caches.
In Riverside Park, the three discussed how to handle muggles, a Harry Potter term geocachers have adopted to describe non-geocachers, who often seem perplexed when a geocacher is fingering through bushes or climbing a tree.
One of the ways Howe explains geocaching to muggles? “I’m using multi-million dollar satellites to find a piece of junk.”
Cache in La Crosse
To register for “Cache in La Crosse,” which includes chances to win prizes, go to www.lacrossesportscommission. com or call (608) 782-2250.
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
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