Geocaching is an up-and-coming outdoor activity, quietly advancing in regard internationally. Its chief purpose is recreational, and there are literally thousands upon thousands of hidden caches that span the globe. There are in fact other ways that a GPS can be used.

Spinning off of geocaching for recreational use, geocaching can also come in handy for survival purposes. Here we will explore a few possible ways that a GPS unit can be used for from an emergency preparedness perspective.

There are a ton of good reasons to record waypoints (longitude and latitude coordinates) for survival purposes. For starters, you should mark down a remote camping spot that you have identified as being appropriate to set up your living quarters and that is favorable for sustaining wildlife and other living things. Make it close to a body of water, and not be so well known that it becomes overloaded and unproductive. To go with this area it would be well to record the waypoints of nearby edible plants, roots, and berries. These should be studied out well, and you should be convinced that they are in fact edible and are not poisonous or contain other toxins. A field guide with pictures and descriptive text will help you to identify the ones your body can safely digest.

Further along the “trail” you may decide to indicate a spot that is rife with animals for you to trap. These may just end up being a sufficient source of meat for you; after all, everything tastes like chicken anyway, right? Dig a deep, wide hole that you can put some sturdy plywood over and cover with dirt to act as your cooling unit for foods that require refrigeration. You might also decide to do something similar for other items you’d like to store, such as an axe, flint and steel, a saw, a pair of binoculars, or anything. Remember to record all of these waypoints.
Another extremely useful waypoint for your deliberation is a cave. If you are able to find one that you could fit in and use for harbor, by all means record this, too. While were on the subject of survival, make yourself a hooter dart. If you got hungry enough you might kill and cook up some bat. Who knows, it might be a gourmet food (somewhere in the world).

Don’t worry, this isn’t Fear Factor. But you might need some strange or unusualsources of protein in an emergency/survival situation. So mark a location where you have witnessed in large amounts the following: red ants (bigger and tastier than the black variety), grasshoppers, and night crawlers. These won’t all likely be plentiful in the same location, so look around and record your results accordingly. And remember, protein is a must– why do you think when the food bank comes around asking for foodstuff donations, items high in protein are at the top of their list for requested items? Chocolate helps life go by a lot nicer. Just melt some chocolate over the campfire and cover these creatures to eat them for practice.

The next thought for something to mark is a honeycomb. Check for some wild honeybees. If you find their home, and it’s near enough to the ground, bingo! If it is in a hole in a tree, for example, and you need something sweet (and you were feeling really adventurous) you could build a fire at the base of the tree to smoke them into a soothing state while you stole away their golden juice!

To sum things up, these are a few of the serious and not so serious (but plausible, nonetheless) ideas of waypoints that you might want to record now before an emergency happens. Don’t forget to record an spot jam-packed with dry wood for fire making. The reason for recording all of these coordinates is for all of you folks with Halfheimer’s that forget the easiest things from one instant to the next. But seriously, everybody forgets some things, and why risk a wonderful find in the outdoors? Record it! Oh, and if you get into some trouble out there… this is a great SPOT to be in!