[GeoStL] Geocaching in the news
- From: Sarah Chisholm <crowesfeat30@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 22:43:56 -0800 (PST)
-
My brother sent me this article he read about geocaching. He thought I would
get a chuckle out of it. Maybe y'all will too.
Sarah
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:57 a.m. January 12, 2006
BOISE, Idaho ? Scot Tintsman says he never had any troubles with the law until
his girlfriend introduced him to what became his all-consuming passion: the
satellite-navigated treasure hunt called geocaching.
"She got me hooked," said the 33-year-old Idaho man, who faces criminal
charges for hanging a green bucket beneath a concrete bridge on a major state
highway last September.
His "cache" was placed for other players to find using handheld Global
Positioning System units. But before he could even finish adding the requisite
trinkets and log books to the cache and posting its GPS coordinates on the
Internet, it was indeed discovered ? by a state bridge inspection crew.
That triggered a seven-hour road closure and emergency response from
officials who feared a bomb had been rigged to the bridge.
Unaware of the alarm, Tintsman was returning to finish rigging his cache when
he rounded a corner on his motorcycle and was confronted by a barricade of
police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain that it was all a
misunderstanding.
"I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on
their holsters," he said. "I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think
they were worried I was going for a detonator."
Tintsman's case of cache confusion isn't isolated. In November, a suspicious
box placed outside the Provo, Utah, police station was blasted by a bomb squad
robot. It turned out to be a geocache containing a toy gun, holster and
nightstick. Geocachers usually take a trinket from a cache and leave another
behind.
In June, a bomb squad in De Pere, Wis., used a robot-mounted shotgun to blast
the lid off a suspicious-looking military ammunition box found in a park. It
also turned out to be a geocache.
And on the night before the 2004 presidential election, police and the FBI
spent hours questioning a man who was seen prowling along a chain-link fence at
Los Angeles International Airport with a GPS unit. He was a geocacher from
Vermont trying to stash a green-and-purple toy snake into a cache placed five
weeks earlier that had already been visited by 463 people.
Guidelines on www.geocaching.com ? the most popular Web clearinghouse for
registering geocache hides and finds ? advise players not to place caches near
critical infrastructure or public buildings that might be terrorist targets.
And with more than 1 million people worldwide estimated to participate in the
sport, geocaching.com co-founder Bryan Roth of Seattle says the number of
homeland security false-alarms is comparatively low.
"I dare say I have heard of no more than five or 10 incidents," said Roth,
whose Web site currently lists more than 225,000 caches in 219 countries.
"Police can always contact us and we'll tell them whether something is a
registered geocache. And if they're still not comfortable with that, we tell
them to blow it up. We don't want to be legally or, more importantly, morally
liable if it indeed was a problem."
Many in the online community of geocachers fear that the sport could be
banned from some areas because of the high-profile scares caused by ill-advised
cache placements. A "Geocacher's Creed" has been posted on the Internet that
asks participants to "avoid causing disruptions or public alarm."
Even when geocachers cause public alarm, criminal repercussions appear to be
rare. In the case of Tintsman, whose geocache was attached high above the
whitewater of Idaho's Payette River on the span of Rainbow Bridge, the local
prosecutor filed a charge of placing debris on public property, a misdemeanor
with a maximum punishment of six months in jail and a $300 fine.
"It's like littering," said Valley County Attorney Matthew Williams. "Any
statute with intent wouldn't work, because he clearly didn't intend it to be a
bomb, and any statute with malicious injury to property wouldn't work, because
he didn't injure the bridge."
Williams said he is not seeking jail time for Tintsman, who has yet to appear
before a judge. But he would like to get restitution for the expense of the law
enforcement and public safety response.
"I by no means want to see people stop geocaching because I know people who
enjoy hiking with their families to find these things," said Williams. "But
this was an unnecessary drain on our emergency resources by someone who should
have followed the rules of the sport."
Tintsman's attorney, Joe Filicetti of Boise, said he's hoping to reach a deal
with Williams that doesn't involve criminal sanctions. Tintsman said he is
still avidly geocaching ? but is now more aware of how the caches may appear in
a post-Sept. 11 landscape.
"I wasn't thinking about terrorism when I placed it under the bridge. I was
thinking about making the most extreme cache possible," he said. "I just got
carried away."
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