Canberra's best hidden secrets: Why 1000 geocachers are coming to town

Behind the door of a metallic cabinet is 'Groot's Grotto', a hideout for the animated arboreal film star who greets visitors with an array of electric lights, and a colourful rock garden.

It's heart-warming, intricate, aesthetically brilliant treasure in the capital, yet one only accessible by a niche few in Canberra, and across the world, who call themselves geocachers.

Over the Easter weekend, almost 1000 Geocachers will converge upon Canberra Park for the first ever Capital Geobash. The majority of those will be interstate, or international visitors, desperately keen to soak up the ACT's hidden treasures.

As Canberra's most loved geocache, Groot's Grotto is likely to receive plenty of attention.

"Baby Groot just seemed to get attracted to me and he's just taken over," says Danielle Sharma, or dty73 as she's known within the geocaching world.

"The container itself is a medicine cabinet from the Green Shed, the Groot inside is one that I had, I've got a thousand Groots, he's on with liquid nails.

"I got the lights out the back of some little garden home depot type store, they had a closing down sale. I painted up a sign saying Groot's Grotto and chucked it all together.

"I was really lucky to get that spot. It's easy to get to, and it was handy to have it in an area that muggles shouldn't go."

A muggle being someone who doesn't participate in Geocaching. Who goes about their life completely unaware of the myriad caches hidden all around them in plain sight.

Someone who hasn't yet discovered this world altering game that often draws people in for life.

Groot's Grotto is one of more than 5000 geocaches hidden within the ACT, which makes Canberra a densely packed haven of a global game which now carries an estimated three million hides all over the world since it was founded in May, 2000.

And they are everywhere here - stashed away at well-known landmarks, and also at those lesser patronised corners of the territory most of us have not yet even discovered despite living here our entire lives.

Local geocachers speak of things like the tranquility of Featherstone Gardens, the vibrato of each footstep echoed inside the Magna Carta Memorial, and the seemingly out-of-place Deakin Anticline which protrudes from the Earth smack bang in the middle of one of Canberra's most central suburbs.

Geocaches are up trees, inside caves, sometimes only accessible by kayak, or with abseiling equipment. They're under bridges, outside cafes and shops, or affixed to a hand railing muggles walk past every day.

Greg Shaw, a clean-cut and energetic golf professional boasting a pearly white smile, started geocaching almost 20 years ago while living in Melbourne.

He's spent more than a decade organising major events across Australia, and as president of the Oz Mega Geocaching Committee, has worked tirelessly for more than two years to ensure this year's event in Canberra will be the greatest yet.

Attendees will enjoy a heavily packed schedule which includes tours all over Canberra, wildlife displays, a car flag parade on Sunday morning down ANZAC Parade, and even the wedding of two local Geocachers.

Chief Minister Andrew Barr will officially open proceedings at 7pm on Friday.

And Shaw expects the Capital Geobash to inject hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Canberra economy.

"A lot of them are grey nomaders, so they're cashed up, they're here to cache, spend money, they go out for dinner each night," Shaw said.

"A lot of them book at the last moment, someone just booked an hour ago from America but you don't know how many they're bringing."

Known within the community as The Farmers 5, Shaw possesses a devilish reputation as one of the toughest cache hiders in Australia.

He's explored almost every nook and cranny in Canberra, and leaving plenty of caches along the way for others to hide. One particularly challenging recent addition takes players to a stack of caged rocks in Symonston at the precinct of Geoscience Australia - one of this weekend's major sponsors.

"I had one in Wagga back in 2010, in the Botanical Gardens, I went and bought a tap with a pipe and I put it next to a water outlet," Shaw recalls.

"You could pull this thing out and the cache was on the bottom, but even to the gardeners, they thought it was a tap.

"Canberra exploded because we had Tankengine who was one of the first people who started to put out a lot.

"There's always something more exciting out there to find. Me and Tankengine even get taken to places today where we didn't know something was there.

"It's really a tourism industry thing where each person is a little tourist bureau information employee of that city, and they'll take you to some hidden little spot that no one else knows but they did, and they'll put a cache down and you'll go."

Tankengine, aka Thomas Schulze, is a part of Australia's geocaching fabric.

He's one of three remaining charter members in the country, and the 61-year-old retired IT professional now dedicates most of his waking hours to the pursuit.

That has included crafting 17 of the 20 gadget caches which will feature at this week's Capital Geobash, each an ingenious design attendees will be given the chance to solve and log as part of the event.

Many hours are also spent running maintenance on his 1000-plus cache hides in the ACT and surrounding regions, some of which are more than 20 years old, not to mention newer creations he's still putting out.

"For me it's always been a bit of a hike in the woods and finding somewhere nice, a nice location, an interesting spot," Schulze said.

"I'll go for a bike ride or I'll go for a hike. Sometimes I work in advance on maps. I've had some assistance with the likes of Tim the Yowie Man and Johnny Boy, they do a lot of stuff within the ACT, they've actually come to me and said this is a really good thing over here, do you want to put a cache here."

When talking sheer number of cache hides in the region, 50-year-old Daniel Newton is unrivaled.

Darkside Dan started geocaching in 2015 after watching a group of hikers search for something on Mount Tennent. Once they cleared off, he went over and found what it is they'd been looking for.

It was a geocache, and it changed his life forever.

"I'm the single biggest solo cache owner in Australia - I have 2205 hides at the moment, which puts me 54th in the world for hiding caches," Newton says.

"About 30 more caches and I'll move into the top 50, I'm so excited about that. I have 168,000 finds logged on caches I've hidden.

"I'm not going to stop hiding them. My original plan was to have 20 of each type that was available, that was my original plan. For the first five years I never hid any caches and after that I started hiding like crazy."

The genius of Schulze and Newton spans the full spectrum of geocaching.

There's the traditional cache, which simply involves visiting a spot on the map, making a find and than signing a log with the date and your caching name.

Schulze and Newton possess multi-caches which require the finder to start at the initial waypoint on the map, and gather information to calculate coordinates to ground zero.

Both have also planted myriad puzzle cachers, which players need to solve to unlock the required coordinates. These can be anything from a simple maths problem to multi-layered cryptic head scratchers that can take years to solve.

One such Schulze creation requires players to delve deep into the decimal points of Pi to unlock coordinates. Darkside Dan meanwhile owns the world famous UFO series, which has taken over Bullen Range.

Schulze was the first man in the world to log an earthCache - a unique type aimed at taking people to geologically significant locations around the world, such as the aforementioned Deakin Anticline. The world's oldest Earthcache is merely two hours from Canberra, at South Durras.

The game also includes virtual caches, Adventure Labs and letterboxes, among others.

Smaller events are also common, particularly in the tight-knit Canberra caching community which gather weekly and often even more frequently.

Then there are the CITOs - the Cache In Trash Out events where geocachers meet in a patch of bush, an oval, along the banks of a river or the side of a busy road and spend an hour picking up rubbish.

Julie Arnold, known as Joolay within the community, has attended 103 such clean-up events.

"The fact that a community will go out for no reason at all to have an event to pick up rubbish in a parkland, or on a hill, the side of a road, I think is fantastic," Arnold says.

"There's something about geocaching that keeps you engaged, keeps you outside, keeps you solving puzzles and finding multi caches, you go and pick up trash to help the environment, you go to events and you meet people, it takes you to places you had no idea were there, that fantastic bridge, or that view, you go round a corner and there's a waterfall."

For Andrea McMillan, or Aykayem, Geocaching has played a crucial role in providing structure and routine to her life after receiving an adult diagnosis of autism and ADHD.

"The last 10 years of my life has been up and down and all the rest of it, and geocaching has been a constant thing to go out and do that's given me joy, and given me friends, and somewhere to go and something to feel good," McMillan says.

"It's one of those hobbies or pastimes where the people that are doing it seem to be very accepting of other people who are doing it. You've got this thing in common, you're interested in the outdoors which is extremely healthy for people, it's really good for your mental health, plus you've got people that are happy to do things with people they've never met before.

"It's a place you can belong."

Diana Terry (Contesta) is an auditor by trade, and a former president of the Canberra Bushwalking Club who discovered Geocaching five years ago.

A quick audit of her statistics paints the picture of how rapidly she has embraced the pursuit. Her efforts in 2023 were astonishing - 4001 finds across the year which averages out to more than 10 per day.

She hopes to bring up her 12,000th at this weekend's Mega event.

"It's the best travel guide," Terry says.

"I had a work trip to Hobart at the end of last year. I did the job, and that afternoon when I finished I jumped in the hire car and drove to Launceston and did the two oldest [caches] in Tassie.

"The next day I'd organised my flight not to go out until four in the afternoon. I drove right down to the bottom of Tassie - there's an EarthCache, a blow hole, just absolutely amazing so I went down and picked up that."

Terry is not alone when it comes to combining travel with Geocaching.

Coffee professional and 2019 Australian Brewer's Cup champion Yanina Ferreyra started playing the game less than two years ago. Going by the name Baristayan, she has already found geocaches in nine countries, most memorably Ethiopia.

"The lady who placed it gave a little container to a local lady who has a tiny coffee stall on the streets in Addis Ababa, you go there and you sit on plastic chairs, and they brew the coffee the traditional way for you," Ferreyra says.

"Once a month roughly she gets someone coming with a phone trying to find this place.

"I went there last year, I took all my coffee clients there, it's like tradition now. This time we brought all the coffee equipment and we brewed her a specialty coffee and it's hilarious, she tried it, and she hated it.

"The locals were laughing, thinking why would all these international people come to our country and do this to coffee? There coffee is a bit more dark roasted and it has sugar.

"It's one of the most wonderful moments I've had with coffee, and it was facilitated by Geocaching. I've been going to Ethiopia every year since 2018, and I would've never ended up there [at that coffee shop] if it wasn't for Geocaching."

It's Wednesday night in Canberra, and the sky has turned pink and orange as the sun starts to set over the Brindabellas.

Scott Wray is atop Mt Painter, just south of Belconnen, where he will be running two tours over the Easter weekend taking participants to Canberra's oldest geocache, among others.

Also known as Toy Hunters, Wray is something of a junior geocacher who has risen through the ranks, to use professional sporting parlance.

The 24-year-old started about 15 years ago and recently logged his 10,000th find to go with the 125 active hides he has in and around Canberra. His 10,000th find was particularly memorable - titled Burden of Sisyphus, it required Wray to lug a heavy boulder up a hill just outside Yass to unlock a container before signing the log.

"Doing geocaching from a young age has really solidified a passion for the outdoors and history, and exploring new places," Wray says.

"It's a really great escapism, it's a good mindfulness activity. When you're searching for a cache, you're focused on searching for it, you forget about everything that's happening, you can detach yourself from the world for a while.

"There are certain things about the world that you don't know unless you do geocaching."

Like Groot tucked away in his grotto. Or one of dty73's latest creations, a pirate Groot who has another hiding spot nearby complete with a pirate ship and aquarium.

Go and find it.