Have you ever wondered about the undiscovered treasures that surround you?
One local Girl Scout is not only finding treasures, but placing them.
Sarah Reinhart, a fifth grader at Birdsboro Elementary School, recently contributed to the phenomenon of geocaching to earn her Bronze Award. Geocaching is a GPS coordinated activity where participants explore the outdoors to find hidden containers, or caches. Each container contains a logbook, where each person who discovers it marks the time and date of their find. There are often tiny trinkets or toys inside the cache for trade.
There are millions of geocaches hidden around the world; all you need is your phone or GPS for the discovery. Reinhart has been a Girl Scout Juliette for the past six years.
Reinhart hid four caches along the trail loop near the Union Township trail head (located behind Tim’s Ugly Mug) for the project. So far, they have been found almost 50 times. To earn the badge, Reinhart focused on the family dynamic geocaching offers, as well as being exploratory, free, fun and a great way to get outside and exercise.
Reinhart and her family are now active geocachers and so far have found 389 caches.
“I just started doing it in June as part of the [Junior Girl Scout geocaching] badge,” Reinhart said.
There are over 500 caches hidden along the Schuylkill River Trail. “You need coordinates to figure out where it is,” she explained.
“It’s really creative what people come up with,” Reinhart’s mother Rebecca Dauber said. Reinhart and her family have discovered caches in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, cemeteries, fake skulls, golf balls, and imitation pipes.
As a family, geocaching allows them to explore new, often historical sites and feel they are “super secret agents.” Non-geocachers or “muggles” are not supposed to see geocachers find the hidden container, which adds another layer of excitement. With a complete binder filled with all their findings, Reinhart and her family are now dedicated geocachers. The family even keeps a repair kit with them on their adventures to mend any damaged caches they find.
“It’s really fun,” Reinhart said. “You can find a whole lot. We’re going to place lots more geocaches.”
