This summer I’ve been leading a series of Wednesday morning hikes up the BC Mountainerring Club Trail on Grouse Mountain. Grouse Mountain is located on the North Shore of Vancouver and is mountainous terrority covered with everygreen trees. Many people have explored this area and know it well. I recently asked my Vancouver contacts this question:
Did you know that hidden along the BCMC trail on Grouse Mountain are two hidden caches of treasure? During our Wednesday hikes we have been discovering these caches and logging our finds on the Geocaching.Com web site.
In my experience, people have either heard of Geocaching and are keen geocachers or they have never heard of it before. If you haven’t heard of it before, Geocaching works like this:
- Someone creates a cache (typically a small waterproof container with a few trade items).
- That person hides the cache somewhere (there are over 800,000 caches hidden around the world).
- The latitude and longitude and hints on how to find the hidden cache are recorded on the Geocaching.Com web site
- People, like us, then check Geocaching.Com, select the caches we want to look for, then we go outside and try to find them.
It’s a bit like orienteering, hide and seek, and treasure hunting all rolled into one. Until you’ve experienced geocaching, it’s hard to get excited about it. I can tell you how much fun it is for a group to run around a forest with a GPS unit, especially when none of the paths follow the straight line path the GPS tells you to follow. I can tell you about the challenges of reading the clues like a puzzle, while searching for small hidden caches. I can tell you about the joy of team solving the puzzle and actually finding the cache, especially if it’s your first one. While I can describe all these things, I cannot give you the actual experience of searching for and finding a cache. And until you have the experience, you cannot truly appreciate geocaching.
Questions to consider from the geocaching experience:
- Which of your products or services have to be experienced to be believed?
- How can you give customers a “taste” of your experience to hook them into what you have to offer?
