While I was in Sunny California I enjoyed getting out in the outdoors and hiking, biking, and kayaking to relieve stress. There are many places for this type of outdoor recreation in San Diego.
While there I got into Geocaching, which is a type of high tech hide and seak.
People go out and hide containers with a logbook or signup sheet, and sometimes goodies that can be traded. They record the GPS coordinates of the cache, and publish it at Geocaching.com.
Then people check this site, which displays maps of your area, or wherever you want to go, with all of the caches indicated. Then the people go out with their GPS units and try to find caches.
I think it started with big Ammo Cans, that they would hide in the rocks, but here in the desert those can be too easy to find, so people started hiding much smaller containers, and sometimes clever containers that are camouflaged, or which have some theme. The people hiding the caches try to place them so the uninitiated regular hikers (often referred to as Muggles) won't stumble upon the cache and take it home with them.
It is often very challenging to find these caches. Once they find them, the geocacher will sign the log, and if there are goodies in the cache they may take an object, but they should replace it with an object of similar value. Sometimes the caches contain special coins that are registered and which can be tracked from one location to another.
This is a great activity. It is a good incentive to get out of the house. You get great exercise and on steep climbs looking for caches is a good excuse to rest up. The goodies are great for enticing families with kids to get into it. Another great aspect is if you are unfamiliar with an area the maps will show you trailheads and trails that you might never find otherwise. It is also a good social activity where you can meet new people and share the fun with others.
It is very addictive and sometimes people spend most of their lives doing this stuff. I was fortunate to run into one of the best and most prolific Geocachers in California. John and his wife had hidden most of the caches in the areas I hiked. I checked their statistics at the Geocaching site and was astonished to read that they had found 19,421 caches since 2004. They set a record of going 1,3787 consecutive days without missing a day of finding caches. On one single day they found 640 caches!
This was a bit daunting for me because the best I could do was 7 or 8 a day. I asked John how they did so many, and he said there are power cache runs along highways where there is a cache every 600 ft. They get in a car with a bunch of others and hop out every time they reach the coordinates, find the cache, and continue to the next. It is a team effort.
Geocaching in southern California has it's challenges. They like to hide the caches under bushes and hidden in rocks where rattlesnakes also like to hide. I am always careful, I always hike with a stick and a cell phone, usually with a companion, and I bought some snake guards to protect my legs.
Now that I am back in Oregon geocaching has much different challenges. It is much harder to find things in the lush vegetation, and often the vegetation and the trees overhead hinders the operation of the GPS unit, and the coordinates seem to wander around more. It is great however, to use this resource to find wonderful trails in my own backyard that I had no idea existed before