Beginning Jan. 1, 2009, North Beach and Leonardtown will be participating in the Maryland Municipal League Geocache Trail. Maryland is the first state league in the U.S. to launch such an event.

MML is using this innovative approach to promote awareness of and visits to Maryland’s cities and towns, with the goal of helping to stimulate economic development in Maryland.

The effort taps into the rapidly growing high-tech tourist trade that is not limited to any particular age group. Discovering a geocache, is very much like going on a treasure hunt using a hand-held global positioning system to plot map coordinates to locate the treasure, or ‘cache.’

‘Geocachers’ must access the official geocache website www.geocaching.com, go to the MML account and download or manually enter the map coordinates for each cache on the MML Geo Trail; then use the GPS to find the caches.

A geocache trail is a series of geocaches tied together by a common theme. The theme of the MML Geocache Trail is, ‘Celebrating Maryland’s Cities and Towns.’ The trail is comprised of 78 city/ town caches located in the eleven MML regions throughout the state.

A collectible, highly coveted geo coin will be given to the first 500 ‘geocachers’ who locate a minimum of 22 city/town caches throughout the state. To be eligible for the coin, geocachers must pick up a passport at any participating visitor center, use the stamp in each cache on their passports, and write in the cache code word.

After at least two municipal caches in each district are discovered, geocachers may return to any county visitor centers and have their passports validated to receive a collectable coin. Among the many interesting things participants can find are reusable shopping bags, key chains, lapel pins, and area maps.

Geocaching is fun and a great way to explore all that Maryland cities and towns have to offer.
Discover municipal Maryland by blazing the Maryland Municipal League Geocache Trail!
Those interested may download a list of participating cities/towns and the participating countyvisitor centers with addresses and hours of operation from MML’s website www.mdmunicipal.org.

Program sponsors and partners include Maryland Geocaching Society, ESRI, KCI Technologies, Inc, Local Government Insurance Trust, Stearns & Wheler, LLC, and the Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau.