Rangers hide bounty for fellow hunters
DERBY District High School’s bush ranger unit cadets have a new motto – if you hide it, they will come.
The group has begun introducing a new geocaching craze to the Kimberley town.
Developed in 2000, geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game which uses hand-held GPS enabled devices to locate small containers which are hidden and left for other hunters to find.
Each container or cache is rated for its ease to locate and contains a small booklet and pen for “hunters” ‘to record details of their find and leave a message.
For the most part, geocaching is online, with tech-savvy hunters reporting back to website forums.
Derby District High School bush ranger cadets are in on the act, stashing caches all over town.
Searches on the website www.geocaching.com reveal the Kimberley is a hotbed of geocaching, with Broome and Derby both home to caches, plus Tunnel Creek, Windjana Gorge and remote locations such as Sale River.
Meanwhile, the Kununurra/Wyndham area has 94 cache stashes.
Geocache items are found by hunters, recorded and re-hidden, or replaced by something of equal or greater value.
Bush ranger Bree Grant said she loved getting outside and looking for places to hide caches.
“We like to put them at great places for visitors to find, maybe somewhere that is not normally advertised,” she said.
The Bush Ranger group has left numerous caches around Derby, and will continue to add to their growing stash.
They set a challenge for readers – find the cache at GPS co-ordinates S 17’19m.363 / E 123’38m.123.
