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Feature article
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Geocaching unearths some unexpected hidden treasures
By Carmen Musick
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Editor’s Note: As part of our Hidden Treasures series, which runs each Thursday during the summer months, GoTriCities staff writers highlight places and events right here in our own back yard that many folks don’t know even exist. Got an idea or suggestion? We’d love to hear it. Write to the Kingsport Times-News, c/o Jessica Fischer, at 701 Lynn Garden Drive, Kingsport, Tenn. 37662 or e-mail jfischer@timesnews.net.
Sometimes hidden treasures aren’t really hidden at all.
Sounds crazy, I know. But hear me out because it’s something I come to believe more strongly every time my family ventures out into this beautiful part of the country we call home.
For the most part, this summer, we’ve operated under the premise that hidden treasures are those lesser-known paths, the roads less traveled, the hidden gems that are routinely enjoyed by only the select few who take the time to seek them out.
While I, along with the rest of the features’ staff, have enjoyed the opportunity to unveil and share some of my favorite “hidden treasures,” the one thing that consistently occurred to me as I worked to come up with a new one each month was that many of Mother Nature’s most amazing offerings aren’t really hidden at all. We just don’t see them — until something gives us a reason to take a closer look.
Take, for example, our latest adventure into the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area.
We’ve been there dozens of times. A number of my Hidden Treasures stories over the past two years have come from there — places like Hurricane and Grindstone campgrounds and the amazing hiking trails and wild ponies at Grayson Highlands State Park.
Yet, on our last trip, we discovered a number of natural wonders that we’d never noticed before — despite the fact that we’d literally passed right by them time and time again.
The difference this time was that we were looking for something. And, in order to find it, we had no choice but to take an even closer look at the world around us.
For the first time in several months, we had decided to go geocaching — and what we found were several of the treasures we were looking for, along with several others we never knew existed.
Geocaching, for those unfamiliar with this global game of hide and seek, is an outdoor activity in which participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or some other navigational technique to hide and seek containers called “caches.”
The caches are typically small waterproof containers (like ammo boxes) that are placed on public lands, but hidden from public view. The coordinates for the caches, along with other details or hints about the location, are posted on a listing site on the Internet (the most popular of which is Geocaching.com). Other geocachers obtain the coordinates from the listing site and seek out the cache using their GPS handheld receivers. They then sign the logbook inside the cache and record the find online.
Often, the caches will include items that can be taken in exchange for something of similar or greater value. Prizes we’ve discovered have ranged from pencils, erasers, patches and small toys to CDs and small radios.
We’ve found two travel bugs — treasures that finders are asked to help along their way by moving them to another cache — including one that remains, without doubt, our strangest and heaviest discovery to date.
It was called “Add a Key Bro,” or something like that, and had traveled many miles before we discovered it tucked away in an ammo box on a beautiful forest road — that until that time we didn’t know existed. The keys numbered in the hundreds, and we couldn’t resist adding another and relocating this unique find to a cache a little closer to home.
But I digress. My point was about the road less traveled — the one we might never have found had we not gone geocaching. Since that day, we’ve traveled the route a number of times: to pick berries, to watch the steady stream of horseback riders enjoying the area’s many horse trails, to see the forest in bloom and the autumn leaves changing, and watch the wildlife.
And that forest road is certainly not the only “hidden gem” we’ve discovered while geocaching.
Most recently, we happened upon the rushing waters of a beautiful little waterfall we’d never seen before — located literally just a stone’s throw from a road we’ve traveled at least two dozen times before.
A short distance from Grindstone Campground, where we were spending the weekend, the GPS directed us to an area where a small paved pull-off led to a steep, but well-traveled trail, on the side of the road. We ventured down and, lo and behold, quickly discovered how the cache earned its name. The “Roaring Water” made it impossible to communicate from any distance, but provided a sneak peak at yet another natural wonder we hadn’t even noticed before. The next day, as we drove by it again, an opening in the trees provided a glimpse of the falls and we couldn’t help but wonder how we’d managed to overlook it so many times before.
It certainly gave credence to my theory that sometimes hidden treasures aren’t really hidden at all — we just don’t see them until something gives us a reason to take a closer look.
So, as we end our series on Hidden Treasures for the summer, I encourage you to use the fall, winter and spring to seek out your own hidden treasures — perhaps through geocaching. I can pretty much guarantee that the treasures you’ll find in the caches won’t come close to the hidden gems you’ll discover along the way.
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