Across the entire state, each of Utah's 29 counties will have five official Utah GeoTour geocaches (ammo cans) placed within their counties. Utah GeoTour participants, or "geocachers," download an app from Geocaching.com, which highlights all of the Utah GeoTour geocaches from an official Utah Geo Tour webpage.
An avid team of volunteer geocachers, hid geocaches in locations of exceptional scenic, historic or cultural interest. The heart of the Utah GeoTour is aimed at highlighting locations visitors from around the world might not otherwise think of going. This program was born out of a "Rourism" initiative, which is aimed at stimulating visitation to Utah's rural counties and showcasing Utah's extraordinary scenery, as well as historic and cultural points of interest. Of course, the Utah GeoTour involves all 29 counties in Utah, but this GeoTour is really a "game" designed to get people traveling to visit the entire state plus spend time learning and discovering how uniquely extraordinary is Utah.
Geocachers love the thrill of making a find, or discovery. It's the thrill of the find that inspires the geocacher to find more caches. Some 99% of the two million or so geocachers from all over the world use one website, geocaching.com. Users create a profile, which showcases his or her number of finds. Whenever a geocacher finds another geocache, they log the find on geocaching.com and have the option to make comments about a specific cache, state whether they were able to find it or not and be able to share the experience of finding that cache with others. If a geocacher considers any caches to be particularly engaging, they have the option of giving the cache a "Favorite Point." Thus far, the Utah GeoTour has accrued 250 favorite points. In short, geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunt that is made possible by GPS technology and, while there are specialized GPS devices available, most geocachers simply use the GPS capability in their smart phones to play the game.
There are hundreds of thousands of geocaches placed all over the world. What sets the Utah Geo Tour a cut above random geocaching and above other GeoTours? Each of Utah's 29 counties will have a unique patch designed by the Utah Office of Tourism. Once a Utah Geo Tour participant finds three of a county's five Utah Geo Tour geocaches, they follow the instructions on a laminated code card found within each cache. Each code card has a unique code and instructions to a patch pick-up location where, once three codes have been found, the codes can be presented to the pick-up location to be awarded with the county patch. Once a geocacher has been awarded ten county patches, he or she is qualified to receive an official Utah GeoCoin. This coin will be minted with a unique trackable code found on geocaching.com. Geocachers register each coin on the site and have the option of simply collecting it or giving the coin a purpose on geocaching.com and putting it into another geocache container for other geocachers to find. Once a geocacher finds a trackable, such as the Utah GeoCoin, they can look it up with its unique code and discover what purpose its previous owner had created for it. For example, a trackable could be given the purpose of making it to the Eiffel Tower. Once the trackable begins its journey, each person that finds the coin logs the find and often takes a picture of themselves with it and moves it along toward the destination or accomplishing its mission. The original owner can literally follow the trackable on a geocaching.com map to see where it is and how and where it has moved from place to place on its journey.
If any geocacher is ambitious enough to redeem all 29 patches, an official Utah Geo Tour jacket is awarded, where the collection of patches can be exhibited. When geocaching brings a treasure hunter to Grand County, http://www.DiscoverMoab.com will be a useful resource for travel information for Moab and the surrounding region where those geocaches are hidden.
http://www.visitutah.com/things-to-do/outdoor-adventures/geocaching
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