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March 30, 2018 06:55 pm

A Struggling Town Is Reviving Itself With... Geocaching

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the town of Wilberforce, Ontario, a quick detour from the main street will take you to a seven-foot-tall wooden fork that sits at the point where the road splits into two -- a literal fork in the road. Unfamiliar passers-by may think it's a joke. But to locals, this landmark goes by the name "Fork and Beans." It has a logbook hidden inside its frame and it's one of the more than 500 geocaches scattered around Wilberforce -- the "Geocaching Capital of Canada," as the town calls itself, and home of one of the most popular geocaching tours in the world. The rise of Pokemon Go in 2016 brought with it a surge of location-based outdoor games on mobile. Geocaching, which is akin to an outdoor scavenger hunt, uses GPS to locate hidden caches with logbooks inside and predates the latest crop of augmented reality games; it was a fixture of internet culture at the turn of the millenium. Geocachers use either an app or a GPS-enabled device to search for hidden containers (usually filled with something like a notebook) that are nearby or that they've sought out online. According to Geocaching HQ, a company that created one of the largest websites for the geocaching community in 2000, there are currently more than three million of these caches hidden in more than 190 countries around the world. For Wilberforce, geocaching is more than a game from back when a low-res dancing baby was the height of online entertainment. It's a growing industry, with new caches being hidden and special events organized every year, that is helping keep the town afloat amidst economic struggles.

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