By Emily Christensen
In the 14 years that Dr. Brian Birgen has been geocaching, he has found caches in more than 800 U.S. counties, 47 U.S. states (he’s only missing Alaska, Idaho, and South Carolina), and even a few foreign countries. During that same time, he placed about 70 of his own caches at locations around the country.
That is, until this spring, when his number of placed caches exploded to more than 200. For nearly a year, Birgen, a professor of mathematics, has planned and executed the installation of a giant piece of geo-art in the shape of a Knight’s helmet on a large plot of land between Waverly, Readlyn, Plainfield, and Frederika.
Geocaching is a treasure-hunt-like activity that uses GPS to aid individuals in hiding and seeking containers called geocaches. Geo-art is a collection of geocaches that have their posted coordinates arranged in a way that creates an image or spells out a word.
“A lot of the credit for this idea goes to Joe Turner (who geocaches under the alias Nascar Joe). He created a 150-cache geo-art of an Independence Mustang south of the town,” said Birgen. “He inspired me to try one, but you need a big empty space on the geocaching map.”
Using city- and county-owned rights-of-way and a nearby wilderness area, Birgen placed 133 caches this spring. The catch: None of them are actually where they appear on the map. To locate each physical geocache, one must first solve a puzzle.
“Some are easy. Some are hard, but if you want to complete the entire geo-art, it will definitely take some work,” Birgen said.
Stacey Snyder ’86 is up for the challenge. A longtime geocacher, she was excited when Birgen mentioned that he was going to be placing new caches in the area. But he never mentioned just how many or that they would be a work of art.
“After I realized what he was doing, I tried to figure out what he was creating since he released the caches in different waves. I knew it wasn’t the Wartburg W, and then I saw the Knight head,” she said. “Cachers like to be the ‘first to find,’ and I knew right away I wanted to be first on at least a couple. One of the puzzles was a Set game puzzle, and I was first on that.”
The puzzles include everything from linear algebra and Diophantine equations to Candy Crush screenshots and photos of Wartburg professors.
“I’m pretty proud of some of these puzzles. And every one has been found by someone, though there isn’t a single person who has found all of the caches yet,” Birgen said. “There’s even a guy in Chicago who has solved all the puzzles, but he hasn’t been here to find any of them yet. He just likes solving them.”
Ever the mathematician, Birgen used an Excel spreadsheet to track the creation. Each of the 133 caches needed dummy coordinates (what is seen on the map), real coordinates (which had to be within two miles of the dummy coordinates), and a unique puzzle to solve. Then, Birgen had to hide each of the microcontainers and create their webpage at geocaching.com.
“It was a fun tribute to Wartburg. I know a lot of alums who are geocachers, and I wanted to put some art in the area, so the Knight head seemed like the most logical choice,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to do, but it’s kind of like renovating a house. It’s a good experience, but you don’t really need to do it more than once.”
