Welcome

The BYU Wellness Program created hobby groups for BYU employees to join to share the joy of hobbies we have.  Geocaching can be done for free or you can pay for the yearly subscription and get more access.  The main website used is www.geocaching.com.  You can contact me, Brian Anderson, at bea@byu.edu

BYU Hobby Group

My initial plan is to hold roughly monthly meetings of this group at a lunch hour.  We can do some meetings where we introduce geocaching to attendees, showing them the website and helping them get signed up.  We can have meetings where we each share ideas for creating new geocaches or share our geocaching adventure experiences.  We can also occasionally plan to go out and find one on campus as a group.  Mostly I feel like this group will help you get started and encourage you to do it with your family and friends (kids love going treasure hunting).

Getting Started in Geocaching

Go to www.geocaching.com and create a free profile.  Once you create a profile there are several introductory videos to help orient you to the game on this website.  What I typically do is just click the magnifying glass without any search terms and then click on "Map geocaches".  I then zoom out or zoom in or move the map around to the area I'm interested in searching for them and then I click on the cache icons that I might want to try to find.  All of the above is mostly easily done on a web browser on a computer.  For mobile phones, there's a geocaching app available in app stores that is free to download.  This app mostly gives you the same functionality but unfortunately you can only easily access geocaches that have difficulty and terrain ratings that are 1.5 or 1.0, the caches with ratings higher than that can be freely viewed on a browser on a computer (it bothers me that they have less available through the app).

Once you identify a geocache to go find you can enter the GPS coordinates into a GPS device, I bought a Garmin model for around $90 years ago, or your phone usually can direct you.  When you find it you can sign the log book and possible trade toys.  Then you go back to that cache's webpage and log it electronically.

About Me

Geocaching Stats:

I have been geocaching since Dec. 2003.  I certainly haven't found the most geocaches among people who geocache in Utah County but I enjoy it.  As of Aug. 2024 I have found 1238 geocaches in 31 U.S. States, 2 Canadian Provinces, and a few in Japan.  Of those, I've found 669 in Utah, 230 in New Mexico, 57 in Pennsylvania, 55 in Oregon, 45 in California, 39 in Colorado, 27 in Nevada, 22 in Arizona, 11 in New York, and 10 in Wyoming.  You can see that I like numbers and stats.  Below is a figure I created to track the number of geocaches I have found since the end of 2003.  We have moved a few times since then and the icons indicate that.

Map of my finds from Japan to Hawaii to the U.S. and Canada:

Map of my finds in Utah County: