JUST when geeks have finally found a sport worth leaving their computers for, someone tries to ban it. Some US national parks are starting to prohibit an oddball technocentric activity called 鈥済eocaching鈥�.
A modern treasure hunt, geocaching involves using a GPS receiver to help find hidden troves of useless junk, simply called caches. People hide the caches and then post GPS coordinates on the web so others can find them.
But now Scottsdale鈥檚 Mountain Preserve in Arizona and the St Croix National Scenic Waterway in Wisconsin are concerned that the caches are becoming a hazard. And, they say, geocachers are damaging terrain with their off-road vehicles. 鈥淚f you have a large number of people travelling in the same direction, before long you have a new trail,鈥� says Lee Dickinson, a National Park Services spokesperson.
Advertisement
鈥淭here has to be some balance here, a total ban doesn鈥檛 make sense,鈥� says Brian Roth, owner of geocaching website Groundspeak. 鈥淚f there are off-roaders in the park in the first place then there鈥檚 going to be a certain amount of damage. But if people are trashing the parks that absolutely has to stop.鈥�
The ban won鈥檛 be easy to police. In the two-and-a-half years since it began, more than 70,000 caches have been placed in 174 countries with 600,000 treasure hunters in pursuit (快猫短视频, 13 January 2001, p 19).