Christmas Geocaching

Geocachers sometimes put huge effort into temporary caches that are available only for a few weeks and then removed. The first one I encountered was a lovingly elaborated Easter Egg cache at Velamsund not far from where I live, which myself and the ladies of my family logged one sunny day last spring. Some of these super-rich caches even form annual series, such as the Trollvinter caches west of Stockholm.

Two of Sweden's most active geocachers call themselves Moomin and Snork Maiden after Tove Jansson's wonderful fantasy books. Hide a cache in some far-off location, protect it with a complicated puzzle involving differential calculus, and you can still count on Moomin finding it within hours. The man always keeps climbing equipment, an inflatable boat and other useful gear in the back of his car.

"Trollvinter" is a short story in Jansson's 1962 collection Det osynliga barnet (Eng. Tales from Moominvalley). Here the Moomins wake up from hibernation in the middle of winter and find all their neighbours in a tizzy over the approach of Christmas. The Moomins, never having heard of this before, interpret "Christmas" as a threatening being that is on its way to the Moomin Valley and must be appeased with offerings of food and presents.

The Trollvinter caches are far more peaceful in tone. Moomin and Snork Maiden select a small spruce tree in the middle of the Lovö woods, decorate it lavishly, adorn it with electric candles and wire it up to a car battery with an ingenious switch. Then they put a plastic crate full of little presents under the tree.

In order to find this year's Trollvinter cache me and my pal Lars had to wander through the woods, passing a series of tests on Moomin lore. Every station is marked with a little electrical lamp controlled by a photosensor. When you lift the final lamp from its stand to read the question underneath, you trigger the Christmas tree's candles. A beautiful surprise after dark!

Dear Reader, I wish you a merry yet supremely peaceful Christmas. Luckily, that's what I'm having myself. And meanwhile, I'm stockpiling longer blog entries for the new site, which I hope to have on-line some time within two weeks from now.

[More blog entries about geocaching, christmas, Sweden; geocaching, julen.]

Geocaching Get-Together

I co-hosted a geocaching get-together this afternoon. Standard geocaches just have spatial coordinates. Event caches have temporal ones as well. In this case, the spatial position was a café in central Stockholm, and the temporal one was today at 1430 hours.

Lots of people showed up, had tea and pastries and enjoyed themselves. All ages except teens, who are too cool for geocaching. It reminded me of my first on-line forum parties back in the late 80s. People you've talked to over the computer, whom you feel you know, but whom you've never actually met IRL. The main difference is that geocachers mostly just discuss how to find Tupperware under rocks in the woods, while general forum discussions cover a lot more thematic ground than that.

One thing that really touched me was a retired gentleman who asked me timidly if I might possibly give him a hint for one of my caches that he'd had trouble finding. When I run into trouble like that, I instantly rattle off e-mail to the cache owner and people who have found the thing recently, asking for a bit of help. But this old guy had visited the place something like five times to no avail, without contacting me. I felt guilty for making the riddle too hard for him. But I'm glad he finally asked, and I believe the social setting was what got his courage up. Geocaching can clearly be a lonely game if you're shy, and there seems to be a lot of interest in more of these four-dimensionally pinpointed caches in the near future.

Actually, we only pinpointed it in three dimensions: X, Y and time. It could have been deep inside the Earth or way out into the atmosphere. But enough participants assumed that we meant street level and so found us.

[More blog entries about geocaching, Sweden; geocaching.]