The Minnesota State Park Geocaching

Geocaching

Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world....

 Challenge took place from May 3rd, 2008 to January 1, 2009 in Minnesota State Parks. It took place to celebrate Minnesota's sesquicentennial or 150 year anniversary of statehood. A geocache is a container hidden anywhere across the globe that can be found using a Global Positioning System

Global Positioning System

The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...

 or GPS. This http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=7eb68725-7069-409c-88a8-9304105b1418 is a link to a list of all of the geocaches involved in this challenge. The geocaches involved in the challenge were hidden by Minnesota State Park rangers under the Geocaching.com username Minnesota State Parks.

Overview

After finding a State Park geocache, you receive a History Card with a picture and quick facts from its respective state park. For the challenge, the state was divided into 5 regions, Northwest, Northeast, Central, Metro (metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul), and Southern. The idea of the challenge was to find all geocaches in all five regions and eventually, the entire state of Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

. After finding every geocache in a region, a geocache hunter must show all the History Cards to the park ranger and they will receive the coordinates to a regional challenge cache. (Here is an example: If you found all the caches in the Southern region, you must find another regional cache. For this region, the regional cache is located in Upper Sioux Agency State Park

Upper Sioux Agency State Park

Upper Sioux Agency State Park is a Minnesota state park on the Minnesota River, south of Granite Falls. It preserves the site of the historic Yellow Medicine Agency which was destroyed in the Dakota War of 1862.-External links:*...

.) After finding all the geocaches in a region plus the regional cache, you receive a special medallion. Also, in order to complete the challenge, you must find all State Park geocaches in the state of Minnesota (this includes the regional caches) and find the Final 72 Park Geocache, located in Mille Lacs Kathio State Park

Mille Lacs Kathio State Park

Mille Lacs Kathio State Park, also known as Kathio Site, is a Minnesota state park on Mille Lacs Lake. The park preserves habitation sites and mound groups, believed to date between 3000 BC and 1750 AD, that document Sioux Indian culture and Ojibwe-Sioux relationships...

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On January 1, 2009, the Minnesota State Park Geocaching Challenge ended and all of its involved geocaches were deleted (or in geospeak, archived).

2009-2012 successor

Based on the first geocaching challenge, the parks are sponsoring the Minnesota State Parks Geocaching Wildlife Safari which runs from May 2, 2009 through May 2, 2012. The parks provide loaner GPS units for participants who do not own their own and the park staff is also conducting geocaching training sessions. The first to finish the challenge were Jason and Sarah Geisel on June 6, 2009. The parks are posting photos of all finishers on the contest website.