Florida state parks are inviting visitors to try their hand at treasure-hunting this summer. More than 70 parks and trails are part of a high-tech quest to find hidden containers.
People all over the world participate in this game, known as geocaching. Players, or “cachers,” hunt down the caches using GPS-enabled devices, and log their progress both in the cache and on the internet.
This summer, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection wants to get Florida residents in on the fun. The department has officially partnered with Geocaching.com for the Operation Recreation GeoTour. The tour’s caches are hidden across 74 parks and trails all over the state, including Tallahassee’s Maclay Gardens State Park.
Parks Recreation Program Manager Robert Barrett hopes the tour will get cachers to explore the parks in new ways. Toward that goal, he says each park’s staff got to choose the cache locations.
“They know their park the best, so they knew where they wanted to draw attention to, and where the best place to hide it would be," Barrett says. "We did had one little caveat with that, and that was that they choose something historical in the park to feature in the geocache.”
As an added incentive, the first 75 cachers who find 40 caches on the tour will earn something called a Geocoin. This achievement can unlock even more caching adventures, which means an exploration-filled summer for thorough cachers.