By John McCoy

Staff writer

Some people visit West Virginia's state parks to picnic. Others like to camp, fish, hike, ski, or ride bicycles.

And then there are geocachers - people who follow satellite-generated GPS signals to find boxes of trinkets hidden in the parks.

"West Virginia state parks have chosen to permit geocaching in the parks, and the park caches have become very popular with the geocaching community," said Philip Smith, an avid geocacher from Spencer.

Geocaching involves hiding a watertight box somewhere on the face of the planet, finding its precise location by getting a fix on a handheld receiver from orbiting Global Positioning System satellites, posting the location on the Geocaching.com website, and inviting others to use their GPS receivers to try and find it.

Searchers who find the cache take a trinket from it, leave a trinket of their own, sign the cache's register, and put it back for the next enthusiast to find.

The pastime has become quite popular in West Virginia, where remote and scenic hiding places abound. Smith said the Geocaching.com website lists about 1,000 Mountain State residents who have become registered geocachers. The site also lists 3,367 caches hidden somewhere within the state.

According to the West Virginia Parks website, 120 of those are located in state parks or state forests. Only four parks are currently without at least one cache - Bluestone, Droop Mountain, Blennerhassett Island, and the Cass Scenic Railroad.

"To find a cache on Blennerhassett, people would have to pay for a ferry ride to the island, so it isn't really fair to put one there," Smith said. "And Cass is a working railroad, so hiding a cache there isn't a good idea either."

Sissie Summers, head of programming for the parks, said geocachers must follow some "fairly strict guidelines" before placing a cache.

"The park superintendent has to go out and physically look at the cache site to make sure it's safe and wouldn't be environmentally damaging," she explained. "We wouldn't want to have one located at the edge of a cliff, or in a patch of posies that might be endangered. Once the cache is registered, we pull that information and put it on our Web site."

Cache locations must be altered at least slightly every year to prevent environmental wear-and-tear. In Kanawha State Forest, for example, the "Gator Bait" cache located near Alligator Rock was recently moved 100 yards away and was renamed "Son of Gator Bait."

Local geocachers have made a game out of finding at least one cache in every state park that offers them. Smith completed the "State Parks Challenge" July 14, becoming the third West Virginian to accomplish the feat.

Smith, also an avid hiker, likes the caches located in parks because many of them are located away from roads.

"I'm not into the 'park-and-grab' geocaches that are located where everyone can easily get to them," he said. "I prefer to hike around, so the park caches are great for me. A lot of them are located in really scenic places, which appeals to the photographer in me. I've visited a lot of really pretty places - places I never would have thought of going if I hadn't been a geocacher."

Smith's penchant for hiking around with a GPS receiver in one hand has also qualified him for prizes offered for state-park visitation.

"I earned a VIPP (Very Important Parks Person) jacket (for making documented visits to at least 15 state parks), and I've earned some of the mileage medallions offered in the park system's Hiking West Virginia program," he said.

Summers said parks officials have embraced geocaching because it accomplishes one of their primary goals.

"It gives people a reason to get outside," she said. "Anything that's an outdoor opportunity, we're for. Geocaching is great because it's good exercise and it teaches about geology and topography as well as technology. Our goal is to make recreation available to the public, and to have it be safe. After that, the game's afoot."

Reach John McCoy at johnmc...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1231.