Ethan Orcutt, 17, has attained the rank of Eagle Scout with a geocaching project.

The Boy Scout 414 member buried nine caches throughout the Ripon community.

Orcutt is a senior at Central Catholic High School with a heavy class load including Precalculus and four other Advanced Placement course challenges with physics. He hopes to attend Stanford or one of the University of California campuses next fall.  He is considering mathematics, engineering, economics or finance as a major. 

He earned high scores in his essay portion of the SAT, finishing 7-6-7 and a 1390 overall with 700 in English and a 690 in Math.

The geocaching is a worldwide hobby involving hunting and exploring new places. Information on the hobby can be found at the Geocache.com. website. At its simplest level, geocaching requires these eight steps.

Register for a free basic membership in Geocaching.

Visit the “hide and seek” Cache page.

Enter your postal code and click “search.”

Choose any geocache from the list and click on its name.

Enter the coordinates of the geocache into a GPS device and navigation screen and tap the compass icon. 

Orucutt was introduced to the hiding and locating of buried treasure-filled cache containers on a trip to Half Moon Bay four years ago. He learned that a person could find the treasures through their listed map coordinates. When he returned home he found only two in Ripon with one at Mistlin Sports Park and another at Stouffer Park.  Now thanks to Orcutt’s project, Ripon has nine more buried around town. 

Orcutt said the cache hunters will add small trinkets to the buried tubes by simply removing the caps and adding to whatever they find inside. Itwas noted that before banks came into popular use, cash was buried in cans in the ground for safekeeping. 

He recalled that one group of out of town hunters located a cache at the large reflective Ripon war memorial at Locust and First streets and wrote back how excited they were to find such a memorial to the U.S. servicemen. Without their caching hobby they would not have come into Ripon, they noted. 

There are a 5,670 caches buried in the city of Mountain View alone. 

The new Eagle Scouting considers his parents to have been the most instrumental in both Scouting and in his education.  His mother Charlotte is a Superior Court Judge in the San Joaquin County Superior Court and his dad John retired recently at the rank of Captain with the Manteca Police Department.  

The senior Orcutt always went along on all of Ethan’s camping trips as a volunteer Scouter and even worked at his summer camp. 

Orcutt runs cross country for Central Catholic High. He plans to wrestle for the Raiders.

To contact Glenn Kahl, email gkahl@mantecabulletin.com.