I’d been geocaching for less than 2 weeks when I found my first benchmark. I was looking for a cache at the top of a mountain here in the Adirondacks, and there it was. I took a picture of it, one of many for the day, and promptly forgot about it until I saw the Benchmarks link at the top of my account page at Geocaching.com. I logged the cache and the benchmark, and resolved to look for more benchmarks in the future.

The next day, I went out with printouts for a number of caches and benchmarks, confident that I would find them all with ease…HA! The snow didn’t help any (April is still deep winter in my neck of the woods), but I spent a long time looking unsuccessfully for the first few benchmarks in my stack of printouts (the benchmarks started less than ½ a mile from my house, and the nearest cache I was looking for was 10 miles away). I was ready to give up and just assume that benchmark hunting was too tricky/hard for me (stupid things weren’t at the coordinates like the caches were), but decided to try one more place.

I drove into Lake Clear Junction (a Post Office and a crossroads), and pulled over to look at the description for Benchmarking’s last chance with me. It was then that I noticed the fine-printed notice that: “Coordinates may not be exact. Altitude is RESET and location is SCALED.”, and decided to read the directions at the bottom of the page. The directions given to the benchmark were much better but I could tell that they would lead me onto somebody’s property, so before looking for the benchmark, I went over to the house’s front door and knocked. I explained what I was doing, how I was doing it, and why I wanted to find this thing anyway. The woman in the house thought I was pretty odd, but agreed to let me search for the benchmark on her property; I could see her watching me out of various windows the whole time I was out there.

I walked in along the railroad tracks given as the primary reference point, counting my paces from the intersection with the road, and when I guessed that I was about the right distance from the road, I took a bearing with my compass, turned towards the benchmark (and my audience), and paced off the feet towards where the benchmark should have been. There was nothing but snow at the spot I had been projecting myself towards, but I found the benchmark about 10 feet off to one side just even with the snow. I did a dignified victory-dance (think Fred Astaire meets Fred Flintstone), and took some pictures while listening to the woman from the house come out to see what I had found. She had lived in the house for 10 years, and had no idea that the benchmark was there, and all of a sudden she thought benchmarking was the coolest thing ever, and had all sorts of questions about it.

I haven’t found many benchmarks, and now that the snow is in for the season I don’t have plans to go looking anytime soon, but I have loved hunting the ones I have found. It’s an entirely different type of adventure than geocaching, but it is definitely a satisfying hunt. I think it’s a great way to go on a GPS adventure in areas where there aren’t any (or anymore) caches, when you want to hunt using directions, to get a feel for the history of an area (there are benchmarks out there over 100 years old, many of which haven’t been found since being placed), or just for some variety in your GPS recreation. Benchmarking is a fun, challenging, and interesting hobby that I’m going to keep working at in the coming years.

Addendum: I’m part of a group of people working on a website that aims to catalog/index all forms of GPS recreation; the website is GPS-Fun.com . In addition to the links and other content we hope to provide in the future, we have just started a benchmark program which will allow people to place their own permanent benchmarks and log them through our site. We’ve given a number of the benchmarks to “Benchmarks” of the GPS recreation community, those people and organizations by which others are measured; the rest are available for anyone to buy. It is our hope that this website and the benchmark program will open up new types of GPS recreation to our visitors, and allow others to take part in the variety of activities that have given all of us at GPS-Fun.com so much pleasure.