Township Council Adopts Geocaching Policy

Lower Saucon Township now has a policy that stipulates how and where geocaching games can be played, even though many local residents probably aren't sure what exactly geocaching is.

At council's Oct. 19 meeting, before the policy was adopted unanimously, resident Mike Kiefer asked Township Manager Jack Cahalan to explain the activity to him and others in attendance.

Cahalan called geocaching a "real fun sport," and said it involves the use of global positioning devices to find "caches" hidden inside small containers.

In many ways the activity resembles a high-tech scavenger hunt.

At www.geocaching.com, Cahalan said, anyone can enter a zip code and obtain a list of all the geocache locations within a certain radius.

"You go out with your family...and then you go find the geo-cache," he told Kiefer. "There are thousands of people out geo-caching and they consider it a real fun sport that gets them out moving around areas."

In Lower Saucon Township specifically, geocaches are hidden in places such as , , and along the , Cahalan said.

Township parks that include historic sites such as the and the will not be used by geocachers, as outlined in the policy.

"I have to say, (it's) given people a view of our parks (that they wouldn't have otherwise had)," Cahalan said. "It's educational, it's recreational, and if you talk to a geocacher, they're always smiling."

Councilwoman Priscilla deLeon noted that when a cache is found, it's to be left in place for the next person who comes along.

However, sometimes messages are exchanged or items of little value are traded via a cache, according to an article about the subject on Wikipedia.

According to the article, there are more than 5 million geocachers worldwide.