Leeanna Clark, a registered nurse and Staff Development Coordinator at the Williamsport Home, is the guest speaker at the 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13 meeting of Northcentral Chapter 8, Society for Professional Archaeologists.

The archaeology chapter meets the second Tuesday of each month, October through April, at Lycoming County Historical Society, 858 West Fourth Street (west side entrance). More information is available on the Internet at “http://www.PennArchaeology.com.”>www.PennArchaeology.com.

Clark will discuss the “treasure hunting” hobby she shares with her grandchildren: the worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure called geocaching. A geocacher can place a “treasure” a geocache – somewhere interesting, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online after they enroll at the free, official global GPS cache hunt site, www.geocaching.com. The public is invited to attend and encouraged to bring a hand-held GPS receiver for experimenting with geocaching.

Anyone with a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver can then try to locate the geocache. A cache can be any type of container and usually holds a logbook that finders sign. It also can contain trinkets or small tradable items.

Other caches contain “Travel Bugs” which are small trinkets with a tracking number attached. They are meant to be taken out of a cache and put into another-in other words, to travel. Geocoins also are traveling cache finds that are similar to Travel Bugs.

“Geocache containers can be anything watertight from a nano (a small metal tube as small as your fingernail) to huge (buckets and larger),” Clark said.

“It’s what the geocacher who hides it imagines. Some of the small ones only have a log book but others have trinkets (trade items) and travel bugs that move from cache to cache. If you take something out of the container, you put something back in and try to hide the container the same as or better than you found it,” said Clark.