Geocaching is a treasure hunting sport where you find caches that others have hidden at specific geographic coordinates. Your GPS guides you to hidden places where you can swap trinkets and sign logs. To learn more about geocaching, please visit www.geocaching.com.

BackCountry Navigator is an ideal program for geocaching with your Pocket PC. A cache is shown here on the map, labelled with its abbreviated name. This is a cache that I hope to find by water.

Tapping the screen on this point and selecting the name of the cache on the Point menu brings up the waypoint dialog. The geocache tab now contains the short and long desription of the cache, displayed in formatted html. You can also reveal the clue if you are unable to locate the cache by the description alone.

Note that the information from the GPX file is formatted in html as it would be on the geocache web page. This includes logs of people who have recently tried to find the cache.

To find a cache, obtain a GPX file from geocaching.com. You can go that site to find one or more caches in your area. You can download a GPX file for one place individually, or do pocket queries to get multiple caches within one file.

The next step is to place the GPX file where BackCountry Navigator can read it. To explore the file system on your Pocket PC, press the Explore button on ActiveSync. I can then place the GPX file in a directory on my storage card.

Once you've done that, it is easy to import the GPX file. Choose the import button on the Data page. This brings up a file dialog. Here, I find the file that I have previously placed on the storage card.  

Loc files (.loc) can also be imported into BackCountry Navigator. Note that they are waypoint files only and do not contain the caching specific description information you see on this page.

Note that obtaining cache GPX files will require you to sign up for a membership at geocaching,com. It is worthwhile if you plan to get into this exciting sport for GPS users.