Devotees hunt caches in worldwide hide-and-seek

With her hands on her hips and a hiking boot lodged into a foothold on the side of the hill, a sweat-shirted Maria Evans surveyed the scene. Morning rain dripped through the trees and onto the cement blocks that canopied the incline.

"This has gotten all changed around," she said. "That's why people can't find it. ... It's probably been buried in the rubble."

Evans had noted a series of "do not finds" on the Internet, and they all referred to this one, hidden in the clump of wilderness abutting the northwest side of the A.T. Still University of Health Sciences campus, which could only mean one thing.

Her geocache had gone missing.

Geocachers like Evans hide metal boxes and canisters in natural areas all over the world and post their coordinates on the Web site geocaching.com. Then others, armed with handheld GPS devices, take part in a sort of continuous, international scavenger hunt, locating the treasures (called "caches"). All of the finders sign a log book - tailored to the size of the cache and stuffed inside - at the scene, so the finds they log online can be verified. But sometimes the containers get moved, broken, stolen by non-geocachers (called "Muggles") or, like Evans' cache, covered up as the landscape changes.

Fortunately, Evans, associate professor of pathology at A.T. Still and co-owner of Chariton Laboratory Service, came prepared for a missing cache. She had brought a replacement: An olive green steel ammo box with a miniature notebook, a pencil and some trinkets inside, all bagged in plastic to keep the rain from seeping in.

Evans held the bag up.

"Along with my geo-bling in here I've got some Truman pins," she said. "The alumni office ... has been more than cool in supplying me with geo-bling. That's one of the perks of being a former Board [of Governors] president. You ask them for cheap crap, they'll give it to you."

She mused over several possible new locations for the ammo box.

"I thought this [area] was a good hiding place because there's so many hiding places," said Evans, who decided on a little gap in the slope. "... Look, you set it down in there and cover it up, and they'll walk right over it."

She waved her GPS in the air, trying to latch on to the new coordinates, but the heavy cloud cover was blocking the satellite data.

"I think I'll go back down and then up the way I came - see if it's a little easier to catch the signal," Evans said. "... Aha. There we go."

Mission completed, Evans tromped back through the leaves to her pickup truck. She tugged on her sweat shirt to display the saying printed across it.

"Yep, I use multibillion-dollar satellite technology to find Tupperware hidden in the woods," she said.

Geocaching sprung up in May 2000, after a directive from former president Bill Clinton became effective: to make global positioning satellite technology available to civilians, wrote Shauna Maggs, marketing director for Groundspeak, the company that hosts geocaching.com, in an e-mail. Within the year, a GPS enthusiast coined the term "geocaching," and a second founded the Web site. In 2000, there were 75 active caches, Maggs wrote, and today there are more than 470,000 worldwide.

More than 70 of those caches are within 50 miles of Kirksville, although none have been planted on Truman's campus. Evans said she'd been thinking about hiding one but suggested a student work on it instead.

"It shouldn't be too hard to get DPS' permission," she said.

Evans has, however, planted a Truman-themed trinket. A trinket that moves from cache to cache heading for a specific destination is called a "travel bug." Evans said she placed a keychain called "Harvard-bound" in a cache in Missouri, with instructions to send it to the entrance gate of Harvard University, which bears the same inscription as the Normal Street entrance to Truman's Quad. The travel bug has drifted across the country during the last year - it's now in Pennsylvania, she said.

Evans said seeing where the caches are planted is one of the appeals.

"A lot of times the caches are placed in locations that if you got the mobile travel guide or if you'd done the tour of the area, you'd never see these places," she said. "You see some spectacular views, some spectacular scenery and just neat little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-path, blue-highways kind of places you just would have never seen if you hadn't chased that geocache."

And they're always there, Evans said, whether a geocacher has an hour or a month to spend and whether the cacher is old or young - Evans has cached with both children and retired friends.

Geocachers choose some locales specifically to draw attention to the surroundings.

"My favorite one in the area is the Soldier in the Field," Evans said. "It's between here and Memphis. It's a statue of a World War I soldier, literally out in the middle of nowhere, in a pasture by the side of the road."

The soldier's parents erected the statue when their son died, she said.

"Here's this statue that has all this heartache associated with this family and it's now become a spot where lots of people see it ... because of geocaching, and in a way, that's kind of a healing thing," Evans said.

The Soldier in the Field is just one of the 131 finds Evans has logged on geocaching.com, including one in each of the 70 grid squares in Missouri.

"I ... just crisscrossed the state and completed that," she said. "I did it in a much more low-tech way than a lot of people. Part of doing the [state challenge] was to show that ... you don't have to spend all this huge amount of money for this special GPS or anything."

Senior Tom Vonderharr, who's logged about 20 finds, understands that well - he doesn't even own a GPS device. He just enters the coordinates into Google Earth before he sets out on a trek.