Too early to ski? 

Sure, if you are a eager backcountry type you’ve driven and hiked to find snow.

Me, I’ll wait till the snow finds me, although I am tempted to take a trip to the Whiteface Toll Road for an early season session.

Too late to hike? Sure, many of you hike all winter.

Me, once the temps dip and the trails get icy, I keep my hikes on the flat lands of the Champlain Valley. Thanksgiving is often my cutoff, although a brisk hike up Lyon Mountain can make the turkey taste better.

So what to do in the between-times?

Geocaching is the perfect outdoor fun in the fall/winter, winter/spring transitions.

At this point, you probably know what geocaching is, the nerdy hide-and-seek game using receivers, or these days your smartphone, to hunt for hidden treasure using signals from and latitude/longitude coordinates provided by the Global Positioning Satellite system that orbits us far overhead. You can learn more and see a map of caches near you at geocaching.com.

geocaching.com logo

And geocaching is made for kids. What kid doesn’t love finding hidden treasure, hiding your own treasures and watching to see who finds them.

The thrill of making a find, of seeing an unseen world hidden within ours, is great family fun.

If you are new to geocaching, you may feel somewhat self-conscious at first, seeking the hidden in plain sight. In my experience, your first find usually does away with this and you’ll be hooked.

And maybe like me you’ll geocache the between-times.