pushingthelimits.com

Geocaching is a great sport for wheelchair users. Whether it’s a day long hike into the mountains or a short path through a local park, geocaching can be addictive and fun.

If you didn’t already know, geocaching is a high-tech combination of hide-and-seek, treasure hunting and exploring the outdoors. It involves people hiding “caches” and publishing their location on the Internet. Caches are usually a small weatherproof container that have a log sheet inside that finders sign. They sometimes have small “treasures” in them that finders exchange for others. Seekers use a GPS, geographical co-ordinates to find the caches. Because most GPS have an accuracy of 20 feet or so, the geocaches require some searching to locate them and the co-ordinates will sometimes be accompanied with clues and riddles to help the seeker. 

Geocaching has been around for a while and it’s great fun, but for someone in a wheelchair it can be frustrating to head off, GPS in hand, only to find that the trail or path becomes impossible to cover in a wheelchair. We’ve been there and it sucks. The main problem is that although each cache is rated according to the difficulty and terrain, it’s normally rated by able bodied geocachers who dont have an understanding of what exactly is an obstacle to a wheelchair. So many times heading down a 1-star route (the easiest and supposedly most accessible) we have been brought to a stuttering halt by a flight of steps. Or we make it to the cache itself, only to find that the container is placed out of reach.

Handicaching.com is a site dedicated to geocachers with a disability and provides a more reliable rating system for caches. Their system allows you to easily see how accessible a cache is, as rated by other disabled seekers, by noting things like the type of path surface, severity of the slope, type of obstacles and height of the cache container.

Rather than listing cache locations and details directly, the site acts as a reference tool. Once you find the details of a cache you are interested in on one of the huge listing sites, use the unique waypoint number (ie GC18376) to search if anyone has left a review on Handicaching.

Armed with that reliable knowledge, and your trusty GPS, you can head off and hunt down your next geocache without the fear of being thwarted by those pesky steps again.

Check out our beginners guide to geocaching here

Handicaching.com