Dinah Krohne and her daughter Alexandra use a phone with a GPS to look for a geocache in Ewing June 23, 2011. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.)

Geocacher Bill Boehle, who goes by “Caver Bill” on geocaching.com, maintains several caches around Ewing. (Staff photo by Diccon Hyatt.)

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Sue Rodriguez waded through the muck in the abandoned Manunka Chunk train tunnel, a headlamp piercing the gloom. Eight other lamps flicked through the darkness. They belonged to her three children and five other relatives. Soon the mud grew too deep, and the party was forced to turn around. But they would not be denied their goal.

Rodriguez stayed behind while her 11-year-old daughter Katie, the other adult and three cousins went over the mountain, entered the tunnel from the other side, waded through more muck, and found what the families were searching for: a plastic container with a logbook inside. Each person signed the logbook, and they carefully replaced it where they had found it.
In the end, it was all worth it: the Rodriguezes had found their 14th geocache.

Sue, Katie, Jared and Ryan, of Ewing, all enjoy the hobby known as geocaching. (Sue’s husband Herbert doesn’t care for it.)
In its simplest form, a geocache is a waterproof container hidden somewhere on public property with a logbook inside and maybe a few trinkets. Whoever hides the geocache posts map coordinates of the cache onto geocaching.com or another geocaching website.

Then, geocaching addicts like the Rodriguezes take a portable GPS device, put in the cache coordinates, and go searching. The coordinates get them within “hand grenade” range of the cache, but after that, it’s up to them to find it. The Rodriguezes, who go by 5rr on geocaching.com, have found 115 caches as of press time, and are always looking for more. They have hidden 16 caches themselves, most of them in Ewing Township. Anyone can try to find them.

Geocaching.com, which began in 2000, lists about 1 million active caches hidden all over the world, from city parks to mountaintops to Antarctica. There are hundreds of caches in Mercer County.

Geocaching enthusiasts enjoy the hobby for a variety of reasons.

“It gets us outside, that’s the number one reason,” Sue Rodriguez said. “We also see things we never would experience.”

Some geocaches lead to interesting historical locations, like the War of the Worlds memorial in Grovers Mill in West Windsor, or the sunken concrete ship off Cape May.

“You get to find things that you don’t usually find,” Katie said.

Not all geocaches are in forbidding locations like the Manunka Chunk tunnels. Some are attached to park benches, disguised as a branch on a tree or concealed inside a hollow log. Others, called nanocaches, are small enough to be attached to a stop sign with a magnet. The website rates caches on difficulty, on a scale of one to five, so you know in advance just how devious the person was who hid the cache.

Ewing resident Bill “Caver Bill” Boehle is known on the website for his tricky hides. His cache in Jon S. Watson Park in Ewing, called “Don’t Get MADD,” has earned positive comments from finders on his clever concealment, even though it is just a 1.5 difficulty.

Boehle has been geocaching since 2005 and has found more than 1,000 caches and has hidden 28.

“I like going out into the woods and having a hike and stuff like that,” Boehle said. Boehle, a retired bureau chief for the state DEP wastewater permitting program, had always enjoyed outdoors activities like exploring caves. Then, someone gave him a handheld GPS device and he found out about geocaching. After finding a few of the local ones, he got hooked.

“As I got older, I had less money to go caving and it was cheaper to run around geocaching,” he said.

He’s found caches in 20 states.

“It’s all about the hunt for me,” he said “It’s the challenge of looking for it and finding it.”

Geocaching is not without its perils. Rodriguez once had to reach into a filthy gutter to retrieve a cache, and was once questioned by police. She told them she was looking for a lost watch.

Boehle always looks for bees’ nests before reaching for a cache, and is always careful to make sure that non-geocachers, who are called “muggles” in the geocaching community, do not get too close a look at his activities. When muggles are about, he sometimes holds his GPS up to his ear and talks to it as if it were a cell phone, or pulls out a clipboard and tries to look like an official inspecting something.

The danger is that if a “muggle” finds a cache, they might vandalize or steal it instead of returning it to its hiding place.

Dr. Dan McNeill, a clinical psychologist and geocacher who lives in Lawrence, also tried the “lost item” gambit with a maintenance man at a baseball field, but was embarrassed when he spent 10 minutes helping him look.

Another danger, even with the GPS, is getting lost. Dense woods can scramble a GPS signal, and it’s easy to get disoriented walking in circles looking for a cache. Rodriguez cuts up a yellow shirt and leaves pieces to mark her trail.

McNeill, who goes by “Hobsterspunk” online found out about geocaching from an episode of the T.V. show “Wife Swap,” in which one of the women was an avid geocacher. It stuck in his mind as an interesting hobby, and a year ago he asked his girlfriend for a GPS for his birthday. McNeill, his 15-year-old son and his girlfriend’s 15-year-old son then went out and found a few local caches. McNeill was hooked.

He and the boys went and found a few caches. The teenagers lost interest after a while, but McNeill went on to find almost 200 more caches.

“The kids, they think I’m crazy. They think I’m too into it,” he said. “I’m about to find my 200th one and they probably were with me for maybe the first 10. They’re just into teenage things right now anyway. Occasionally my son will tag along if he has nothing else to do. They tease me about it but they like that I’m into something.”

McNeill has hidden six caches, including a 13-stage “multi-cache” that leads finders along the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail, which he never was familiar with before he started geocaching, even though he is a longtime Lawrence resident.

Ewing resident Dinah Krohne, who is the kitchen operations manager at St. Lawrence Rehab, discovered the Johnson Trolley Line Trail that runs through Ewing and Lawrence, because of geocaching. Krohne, who takes her five-year-old daughter Alexandra on expeditions, said she appreciates the high-tech element. She has a smartphone app that helps her locate caches. She’s been geocaching for two months.

“It’s a good family activity,” she said. “We’re all into it. It’s a great low-cost way to have fun together as a family.”

Geocacher Jeff Hoagland, AKA HamHoagies, a Hopewelll resident and Educational Director of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, views the technology as more of a necessary evil.

“I was real skeptical of the notion of technology in nature,” he said. “It just didn’t appeal to me. But somewhere along the line I just said to myself, ‘this might be a way to keep my kids interested in the natural world.’”

Hoagland found that when geocaching in parks and wild areas, it’s almost impossible not to admire the nature all around, even by mistake. He has placed geocaches throughout the Hopewell area to lure people into appreciating natural wonders.

Interviewed at his office at the Stony Brook-Millstone Nature Center, he said, “I’ve set up several on this property. The point is to get people out here. Finding the cache tells you about the habitat. If you stop and look, you might find voles or shrews or bats or raccoons.”

Some of his caches also reveal bits of local history, like the cenotaph of a Hopewell resident who was lost at sea on the Titanic.

Since he started in 2006, Hoagland has gone from techno-skeptic to a full-blown geocacher with 234 finds. He often takes his six-year-old son Emerson out looking for treasure. But for Hoagland, the treasure isn’t in the geocache.

“For me it’s a treasure hunt, but I like to think the bigger treasure is being out there in nature,” he said.

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