After years of intentionally avoiding buying a GPS, I finally broke down and bought one about a week ago. I had avoided buying a GPS because it seemed to fly in the face of my desire to get away from it all and to experience the unbounded freedom hiking, backpacking and camping brings. However, after getting lost on more occasions than I'm willing to admit, running out of daylight, losing my map, etc., I thought it was time to get one.

So, what better way to break it in than geocaching! I took my kids with me and explained it was "a treasure hunt" to get them interested. We looked for two caches, but only found one. I seriously doubt the other one was still there because it was supposed to be in a tree, but the trees had fallen at that location and we couldn't find it anywhere on the trees or ground. But, we did find the other after some serious bushwhacking. Frankly, it was a lot harder than I expected it to be, but it was fun! My kids took out a little heart eraser with a smiley face from the cache and we put a box of waterproof matches in. I forgot to bring a pen/pencil so we were unable to write our name on the register (I thought we would see some sort of verification code that we would have to punch into the GPS, but I guess I was wrong).

I can see how geocaching could become addicting. I am a little concerned, however, about how much damage to the environment may be caused by large numbers of people going "off trail" and bushwhacking the vegetation. Is this par for the course? I know the idea is to cleverly hide things so they're not easily found, stolen or vandalized by passersby, but is there some sort of protocol about placing caches off trail? There was no way of getting to this cache without doing so. It was 100m or more from any trail.

Thanks for your reply. It is comforting to know there are cache placement guidelines in place. Hopefully, the geocaching community is self-policing and will keep everyone in compliance.