Another not-so-flattering article from Saturday July 22, 2006 Green Bay Press-Gazette. Here’s the text:

Geocachers deny trashing Appleton park during hunt
Alderman accused group of trampling flowerbeds

By Jeannine Aquino
Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers

A group of high-tech enthusiasts known as geocachers, upset they were blamed by an Appleton alderman for trampling flowerbeds in the city’s smallest park, plan to set the record straight.

Justin Korpal, a geocacher from Green Bay, is organizing a July 30 meet-and-greet in the Old Country Buffet at the Fox River Mall in Grand Chute to talk about the sport of geocaching.

Geocaching is essentially a scavenger hunt using a global-positioning system and a computer to log coordinates to hidden “caches,” most often a logbook, but sometimes trinkets contained in water-proof containers.

These caches are located all over the world.

“Geocaching isn’t just about finding hidden treasure in the woods or in a park or under a park bench,” said Korpal, who works in Appleton. “It involves the history of the area of where the cache was placed, or a mini-history lesson, as well as bringing you to an area that you would not normally go to in your daily travel.”

Korpal said the event was in response to report Monday in The Post-Crescent of Appleton in which Alderman Walter Kalata blamed geocachers for ruining the flowers he had planted in Appleton’s Union Springs Park.

Korpal, who said he was the last person to find the Union Springs Park cache on July 12, said it was highly unlikely that a geocacher dug up the flowers. He said most geocachers know that people aren’t allowed to bury a cache, thus eliminating any need to dig using hands or tools.

Ray Handley, a member of the Wisconsin Geocachers Association board of directors, said many people mistakenly assume that “treasures hidden” is “treasures buried.”

“I would say that the Wisconsin geocachers or the cachers I know are the least likely to cause any damage to the environments in which we play,” he said, comparing geocachers to other people, like picnickers, who use the same parks and trails in which caches are found.

In fact, Handley said, one of the basic tenets of geocaching is leaving the cache site better than when you entered it by picking up trash in the surrounding area.

The practice of hauling out garbage from cache locations is called “cache in, trash out,” said Korpal, who has done just that at numerous sites since he started the sport in 2004.

Alderman Kalata said he didn’t have anything against geocachers.

“My complaint, at the time, is that Union Springs Park is such a tiny park, (which) very quickly got trashed,” he said.

He said he came to the conclusion that geocachers had trampled the park flowerbed by observing a steady stream of people walking through the park, some poking around in the trees. On two occasions, he said, he noticed someone holding a GPS.

Parks and Recreation Director William Lecker said he hadn’t heard of any concerns about geocachers in any of the parks in the past.

Lecker said he talked to the person who placed the cache in Union Springs Park. The cache owner told the director that he placed the cache in an area he thought wouldn’t be a problem. His intent, Lecker said, was to draw people to an interesting place.

The Wisconsin Geocachers Association has about 600 members. The national Web site shows 2,754 cache locations within a 100-mile radius of downtown Appleton.

— Jeannine Aquino writes for The Post-Crescent of Appleton.