 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground, I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, we join those who followed their GPS through Minnesota's towns and wilderness, geocaching. The summer of 2016, geocachers came to seek out a hidden geocache near Lakeland's Bemidji Studio. Hi, I'm Alan Olson and I'm a geocacher and geocaching is just a worldwide treasure hunt. Geocaching started in May of 2000 and technically May 3rd, 2000 was the official release date for what they called the great blue switch is what they nicknamed it. It was when technology of GPS was released to everybody. Before it was pretty much strictly a military usage. You watch the traffic that happened during the Clinton administration. They called it selected availability and it was, say, turned on as they call it. And that made the technology available to anybody that wanted to use it. And this person named Dave Olmer, May 3rd, 2000, went and hid a treasure or a box of stuff in the woods in Oregon. He just, for the fun of it, put it up on this listing website. He wanted to see if anybody would just take the whim and go find it now that GPS coordinates were available. Got it. Got it. They'd go online and say, yeah, I found it. They had logged that experience and talked about it. Good job, Nick. And that's kind of the beginning, the very elementary root stages of it. Geocaching was actually a younger version of the letter boxing, which has been going on for centuries. They would direct people by tree, by rock, by different methods, like people used to navigate without maps. So you would get like a letter? No, you wouldn't get a letter from what I understand. You would go out and find something by way of description. And when you would find it, you would find something in that box. I'm not really sure what it would be back then, but nowadays in geocaching, you can find anything from a half a meal toy or a $5 bill or whatever somebody wants to leave in there. It can't be anything. Well, geocaching looks like somebody's lost, if you will say. We're always looking at our phones or for some people, their GPS device and figuring out where we need to go, how close we are to the coordinates, reading the description of this particular geocache, seeing what size it is. Sometimes they'll tell you how it's hidden. They might leave a hint to say it's under a tree or take a seat, which might be it's under a bench or say something to the effect of climbing is involved, which means you have to get up that tree or even signs, you'll find them on street signs where you'll have to find a way to reach it from up high. So what's it like to find a geocache? It's fun. Geocaching is like a treasure hunt. What's the most exciting thing you've ever found? A treasure chest and in a restaurant. What do you do when you're looking for a geocache? We have a GPS or something like that. And there's like an arrow pointing at it and we have to follow the arrow. What does it feel like to go out with your family and find neat things? It's fun. With the cache logged near Bemidji's Lakeland studio, the Olsen kids are off to downtown Bemidji. In downtown Bemidji, there's a unique geocache. I've been to this place before, but I've never taken a tour that this showed you on this video. So a geocache can be anywhere. There are restrictions on it. It cannot be in a wildlife management area. You cannot have them in a cemetery. You can have coordinates based on something in a cemetery, but that's only a virtual stage, not an actual physical piece. A lot of geocaches that we do are in the woods, but not always. We do urban stuff too. You feel a little conspicuous if you're in the urban area because you feel like somebody's always watching what you're doing and it may or may not cause problems. And we try not to be a disturbance to anybody. Again, that goes for 99.9% of us. If you have any hobby, any sport you do, there's always a small percentage of people that cause problems. We're gonna, what we're looking for here is, there's supposed to be a QR code on one of these signs here on the building. And you guys know what a QR code is? Yeah. It's like a bar code that you scan. Well, on the geocaching page, it has a photo of the QR code. We may have to scan that if we can't find the code here on the building. We gotta be respectful of private property. So, we don't wanna mess with somebody's mailbox, which is federally protected. Part of the challenge of geocaching is working out at the mystery, which is funny because this is actually what they call a mystery cache. And some mystery caches you have to solve before you get out in the field. Some you have to solve in the field. See if you can scan that. Just a code. Yes, it goes to a YouTube video. Okay. Where's that chip? Did you find it, Nick? Yeah. You got it on a YouTube video? No. Load up your YouTube video. Now what you have to do is you have to follow this video until you get to where the cache is located. Okay, think we can do that? Should be simple enough. Let's not pull up Pokemon Go. Let's not. Let's play geocaching. The coordinates took us to a place where we were supposed to scan a QR code, which directed us to this video. If you look on the screen, there's another geocacher directing us. He's called, he's Al Habidink. His geocaching is Fargnut. So he's directing us to where to go. So we got to keep following. So we had to follow the video down the street until we got to the final location. This way I have to be, I think. Is that where they were around here? It might be. Yeah, look, where's he at? Look on both sides of the street. Where is that? You recognize it now, don't you? Side center. So it's a word to science center. Where are you pointing? Oh, what was that? Is that all? This is the one. It's gonna be around. And we got to the final location. We found this magnetic key box in the mouth of a dinosaur. Check up in here. So many with hands. Found it. Right there. Next one. Without the real thugs of that. That's neat. And in there there's even a little bit of swag. It's a bracelet or some sort. Did you bring anything into trade? One of the things in geocaching is if you want to take something out of the cache you need to leave something in return. There are some geocaches where they say there is no reason to leave something. I have plenty here and I have plenty more to put in. Feel free to take something even if you don't. But by and large the rule of thumb is you take something and you leave something. She wants this bracelet. It's a girl thing and she likes it and thinks it's pretty so she's going back to the vehicle to get something to trade. I was trying to get a bracelet for that bracelet. We found it, we followed the video and we put it back. Signed in and we're good to go. On to the next one. From my experience going out with my two boys and my two girls, it's just time together with them. I want to be able to spend the time with them that I can while they still want to spend time with me. And they're not so busy in sports or other school activities that they can't get out. We're always tied down to something. So currently while they're still young we can take time and go out or make a couple three-day vacation out of it. With the Puzzle Master Farnott's cash discovered within downtown Bemidji the Olsen kids are off to find the next cash. But who is this Puzzle Master Farnott? Farnott, his name is Alan Habedink. He's a teacher at Cast Lake Vena High School. And he's one of those people that says puzzles are hard. But we call him the Puzzle Master because his puzzles drive you crazy. They're often complex and involve a lot of either math or just strange things to figure out how to solve. Hello, my name is Alan Habedink. I'm a math teacher at Cast Lake High School. I also geocache. My geocache name is Farnott. When my wife goes out with me we're called Farnott's. We sign the log as Farnott's. The idea of geocaching is to be given a little bit of information and then to expand upon it and go out and find something that they want you to find. It could be an earth cache. It could be a little box in the woods. It could be anything. It's kind of the thrill of the hunt. It's where you look for the unknown. And that's the joy I get out of it. Because I'm never quite sure what I'm going to find. But I am almost guaranteed to find something that will lift my spirits. In August 2015, I hosted, along with Alan Habedink, we had the North Star Geoseekers Geocaching Weekend. It was the third weekend of August. We invited people, public included, and geocachers to come celebrate and stay at Norway Beach with us in the Chippewa National Forest and go out and find geocaches that myself and Habedink had hidden for this event. On Cast Lake, I think there's five on Cedar Island and there's about four or five on Star Island. There used to be one on Potato, but I'm not sure it's there anymore. So we're here at the third annual North Star Geoseekers event. This is a group that's, I'm not exactly sure how long it's been formed, but I'm going to say three years. And this is my second event that I've been to. The first one was held in Detroit Lakes three years ago. I couldn't make that one. Last year we went to Park Rapids. The event was held by Jeff and Ray Lynn Fielsen. And that was such a fun event. And this year, Alan Habedink, or Fognaut as his geocaching name is, and I were going to discuss hosting it around this area. And I met with Norway Beach and they agreed that this should be a great hosting site. So we decided to have it here at Norway Beach. And the amount of people, it keeps going up and down, but last year we had around 75. Got some guys that are still looking for last night's, last treasure, the Windigo, that was hidden by the Puzzle Master Fognaut. There's about three teams or four teams that are just scratching their head, just ready to go hold down Fogna until he reels the answer. So it's a pretty tough thing. I didn't get very far on it, but I'm not a Puzzle Master, so. For this event, Fognaut created a very difficult, complex puzzle cache that really drove people crazy in trying to figure it out. One of the most exciting things in geocaching is solving a puzzle. Many people hide geocaches, but they don't give you the exact location. Instead they give you a puzzle that you have to solve. And you will spend anywheres from 10 minutes to 10 hours to 10 days to 10 months solving that puzzle. So you really become invested in it. So when you can solve a puzzle and go out and find that geocache after spending countless hours doing that, there's nothing like that. I myself have created about 70 geocaches hidden around everything from multi-caches where you have to find several caches in order to log it to mystery caches where you have to solve puzzles. One of my most famous one is the Fognaut Legendarium and that consists of five or six caches, a night cache and then several puzzle caches that you have to find. I had quite a variety of terrain and difficulty. Some of my caches, I utilized my kids to climb the trees and hide them up high or they were hanging over a water on a tree and some were just quite simple that were on a trail that you could easily locate. And I also hid some of my own puzzle caches that I made people had to solve to figure out where those final locations are. I'm not personally very good at solving puzzles, so I usually enlist a lot of help in getting them solved. Fognaut's Norway Beach Puzzle Cache continues to mystify the participants. They have a cell phone, they can peek up there and take a picture of it. He keeps looking at my writing. Why would you do that? In the end, it was a lot of fun and people were able to solve it. This is highly competitive. Only for this, not usually. Problem is, they run. Here we go, I'm going to run. I guess I looked underneath the light post over there for numbers earlier and I missed a little tiny numbers, so he saw them and it's writing down. I kind of took a peek from him and took the numbers and I won the foot race. Sprinting all the way here is like, I don't know, 700, 800 feet. It was another 100 feet in the woods there. Yeah, definitely a foot race. That's where sprinting comes in handy. How often did these become a foot race? Usually one team has it by a long shot. So this was a real close one. Yeah, there were three teams that had this one. So what's the culture like? Like, how competitive is geocaching? You know, generally it's not that competitive because there's caches hidden in the woods for years and people just go find them when they're in the area. At an event like this, it can get kind of competitive when there's one cache being sought by so many people. I've gotten a handful of events and never had one that was this close, this competitive, so it was definitely, definitely fun. So what's all the stuff in there? It's just a bunch of geocoins. They're trackable items. You can register them online and put them inside of the geocache and people will take them and move them along to other ones so you can track how far it's gone. Some of them will go on for years, go 10, 20,000 miles across the country, across the world. Others, I mean, they'll get lost along the way, but these are all unregistered ones so it can be used as prizes or we can register them and move them along ourselves. What does it feel like to have solved the lost treasure the way they go? It feels good. It's just good to have the bragging rights Yeah, yeah, we said that last night. We don't know what we'll do with this many geocoins, but we just wanted the bragging rights to see if we found it. That I would like back and I'm willing to pay. They're worth 10 bucks. Could I have you guys come down to the sign? And the nice thing about geocaching is there's something for everyone. It's from puzzles to just exercising to there's several caches out on the islands. So you can kayak out there, canoe. Just unbelievable. Minnesota's been right in on geocaching from the beginning. It's odd, the first one was hidden by a deer stand and it was hidden in November during the deer hunt, which I think really shows what Minnesota's all about. So. And they weren't even gonna come back last night. They should have gone. Now they couldn't resist. In 2017, the third weekend in August, there'll be another geocaching event that'll be put on by the North Star Geoseekers. This one will be hosted in Bagley, Minnesota. We rejoin the Olsen kids on their geocaching adventure near La Porte, Minnesota, as they find a very special cache. On our geocaching adventure in La Porte, we found this geocache that was dedicated to a man who lost his life in the war. And I mentioned on our Facebook group that we had found this geocache and that it would be on the Lakeland TV show Common Ground. And I also included that in the log of the geocache that we had found. And the little young man that had read it was very excited and his mom reached out and contacted us and said thank you and we're looking forward to seeing it. Cool. That's an example box. It's called Black Dagger. It's a one difficulty, which means it's easy to find a three train, which means it takes a little bit of climbing or a little bit of extra work. And this one here says placed in memory of SSG, I believe it's Staff Sergeant Alan Brockman by his son Stephen. Placed by my eight year old son in memory of his father, Staff Sergeant Alan Brockman as a way to combine love for geocaching and remembering his daddy. Feel free to leave Stephen a little note or just sign the log, enjoy. Container with assorted military swag and first defined dollar. Well, we're not first defiant, so that's not in there. And it's placed at County Road 36 and 420th St. Park on gravel road. Is that signed in, guys? Okay, you can head back to the vehicle. Well, geocaching is a culture all of its own and we have a lot of get togethers. One of the things geocaching does is it brings people together. Last week when I was up in Canada, we were down in the breakfast lounge and these two ladies came down who had been geocaching and they were from Saskatchewan. And she said, where are you from? I said, well, I'm from Minnesota, my sister's from Tennessee. She says, well, I found a cache in Minnesota once, just one, it was in a place called Bemi or my sister said Bemidji. She said, yeah. And the thing that impressed me the most is they do the same things, believe the same things. We cash in, trash out, we take care of the environment. There's rules where you can't drive nails into trees. When you place a cache, but the most important thing that I get from geocaching when I meet other geocachers is the fellowshiping that we get, the fun that we have going out and looking for something that they've had. This final cache that we did in Walker was rather tricky. It's a seasonal cache, which means it can only be found, in this case, it can only be found during open water. There are seasonal caches that are easier found during hard water season. But this one in particular, we were using a gallon ice cream bucket that had holes in it. Get close, sir. Careful, nobody's falling over right now, okay? And we were trying to get the geocache out of the container. The container was a PVC pipe that was attached to a birch tree that was wrapped in birch bark. And the PVC pipe also had holes in it. So the bucket's got a bunch of holes in it. I'm not sure how we're gonna, it's really, the cache is really deep inside, so we gotta fill it up with water. Are we supposed to do that with holes in it? So we were constantly having to move faster and faster, trying to get the water into the container to raise the other container up. Obviously, this one is not winter-friendly. It'd be pretty hard to scoop the water out of the lake. That's why you bring water bottles with you. Buckets of water. That's why you bring water bottles with you. Marcus, do you know how many water bottles you use? My kids were moving a little slower, so I had to take over and speed up the process a little bit. But eventually we were able to get that container to the top and one of my children were able to grab the cache before it dropped back to the bottom and we had to start all over again. So many of you be up there to grab it if it pops out. Okay. I'm the tallest. I've got it. I've got it. But I'm the tallest. Now my shoes are getting wet. Look out. I got it. People that are watching this should know that geocaching is for anybody who wishes to do it. We're not an exclusive club. There is no reason why anybody can't do it if they feel so inclined to do it. You can do it at your own pace. You can do it at any age. I've met geocachers that are well into the 80s and parents that are bringing their newborn babies out. So it's just about the experience of what you want to do. Sign in. There you go. Here you go. My shoes will slowly get dried out. Mark is tipping off. Geocaching for us is just the exploring and getting outside through geocaching we have discovered places that we had never have gone before including finding a different place to go swimming with the kids. It's just about the experience not sitting inside just something fun and adventurous to do. Thank you so much for watching. Join us again next week on Common Ground. If you have an idea for a Common Ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014. To view any episode of Common Ground online visit us at lptv.org. For episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. If you enjoyed this episode of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground consider making a contribution at lptv.org.