A Treasure Hunt in the North Country!

By Karen Armstrong

4-H Youth Development Program Educator Cornell Cooperative Extension Franklin County

The sun decided to shine bright on June 27. This was very fortunate since it was Super Family Fun Day in Akwesasne, NY. The event was held at Generations Park. Akwesasne Coalition for Community Empowerment was the driving force behind the day. The Coalition is composed of volunteers and community organization. The day was filled with happy faces and plenty to do!

Activities included face painting, bumper sticker and cape making, bouncing houses and geocaching. There was delicious food for all that attended as well. Cornell Cooperative Extension Franklin County 4-H was there to provide a geocaching treasure hunt. You may be thinking a treasure hunt is full of old decrypted maps and pirates. Not anymore! Well, you could dress up like pirates and pretend to be one if you like to dress up, but it is not a requirement.

Geocaching is a fun and exciting activity that uses a GPS unit to search and explore the great outdoors. The Global Positioning of Satellites (GPS) is a system of satellites, ground control units and receivers that are used to help you locate caches. A cache could be a wide range of many trinkets. I wish they were full of jewels and gold. Even though they are not, they are still really fun to find. The most common cache is a waterproof container that holds a slip of paper in which you can write that you found the cache. Other caches include swapping one trinket for another. The best part of geocaching is GPS and caches are everywhere! It is the technology that is used to guide our car’s GPS units.

Geocaching came about in 2000 after the restriction of satellite use was uplifted. After that people began to hide caches all over the world! There are over 1 million hid all around the world. Geocaching.com is a very popular site to get coordinates to find the caches. A GPS unit is very helpful but there are also apps you can get on your phone to help you find the caches.

At Super Family Fun Day, the caches were hid on the beautiful walking trail at Generations Park. Families were given GPS units and told to go find their caches. Once they were located, families were rewarded with a small prize. There were many families that participated and some families went on more than one treasure hunt.

Geocaching is such a wonderful family activity. It gets the whole family working as a team. It also helps to teach following directions. It uses a fun, rather new science. So, the next time your family is looking for something to do, think about geocaching! For more information regarding 4-H Franklin County programs, please call 518-483-7403.