Outdoors enthusiasts can celebrate the centennial anniversary of the National Park Service by geocaching around Mount Rainier.
Visit Rainier, a tourism promoting group, has partnered with Mount Rainier National Park and the Washington State Geocaching Association to create a 100-cache educational GeoTour of the mountain.
Between 2015 and 2016 the effort will place 100 new geocaches around the Mount Rainier National park and its gateway communities. The latest installment, the third in the series, is intended to highlight White Pass and Chinook Pass, two scenic byways that skirt the mountain.
Geocaching is an outdoor treasure hunt where adventurers use GPS devices to locate a specific cache. There will be four separate series of cache releases around the mountain in total. The first release was on June 13, 2015, and the final series will be released on Sep. 16, 2016. The next round will be released on July 1.
A full list of the Mount Rainier geocaches can be found online at geocaching.com. Each hidden cache contains a code word that participants use to document their discovery. If a person documents all 25 codewords in a release they will be eligible for a trackable pathtag. Adventurers who record all 100 caches around the mountain will receive a commemorative geocoin.
Mount Rainier is offering a few other way to celebrate the national park centennial as well. Several special programs will be offered on the mountain including a History Comes Alive program that tells the stories of the people of Mount Rainier. There will also be a centennial speaker series, a centennial star party and a concert series. Additionally, four free days will be offered at the park Aug. 25-28.
Additional information can be found online at www.visitrainier.com/geotour.
