Seems like it's getting late in the day for choppers to be effective, but maybe that was earlier. I do wonder about this geocaching activity which I had never heard of. In doing that, could she have had any contact with the person who hid the "prize"? I'm wondering if a bad dude could lure a person to an isolated geocaching site.
Simplified, geocaching is basically where people hide caches in places, and upload the coordinates so other people out there can use GPS technology to try and find what's been hidden.
There are different types of caches -- some traditional caches are small containers that hold only a log that is signed to document you found it; some caches are big buckets of little things like matchbox cars or plastic dinosaurs; earthcaches are designed to bring people to a spot that has some sort of environmental significance and they do not have an actual physical cache to find, but you need to answer a series of questions about the place and provide a photo to prove you were there. They are located all over the world. They are hidden by the cache-owner, uploaded to Geocaching.com, and then left for people to find. Owners are supposed to check on it now and again to make sure it's still there, or replace the paper log sheets, but we have found some that have been hidden in the woods undisturbed for literal years.
There isn't really a prize, per se -- the prize is finding the hidden cache, and many times it's the experience of getting there (some involve rappelling, or diving, or climbing a tree, or figuring out how to get your adult-sized body into that child-sized opening in this pile of rocks...) Many of them do have little trinkets and doodads that you can trade out with other trinkets or doodads (my signature item are rubber balls with eyeballs on them, there's a group from NY who leave custom rubber ducks, I've seen everything from plastic army men to ugly costume jewelry...) It's exciting for kids to find the hidden cache and trade an item (adults, too -- imagine two grown men out in the woods jumping up and down over finding a Syracuse basketball pennant...) There are "geotrackers" which have a registration number and the idea is for people to pick them up at one cache and then leave them at another cache, and see how far they can travel around the world. Many caches are designed to bring people to places of interest or to places the cache-owner finds beautiful or special.
It's really a lot of fun. You can do it alone, or with a group. It gets people out in the world and using their navigational skills to take them to interesting places. Some groups have caching events whereby the people out searching for caches are also picking up garbage (cache-in-trash-out events). Boy scouts have hidden caches as part of earning badges. It was a blessing during the height of Covid -- when everyone decided that the only thing they could do was congregate on and clog up the hiking trails, I was able to find ideas for places to get out and be away from the masses.
I guess it could be entirely possible for someone to hide a cache, upload the coordinates to geocaching.com, and then lay in wait for someone to come, but they could be waiting for a really long time. There are some people who enjoy dashing out as soon as they see a new listing so they can have the honor of being the first to find the newly-hidden cache, but for the most part there really is no way to know who or when someone is going to be out searching for your cache. There's a bit of stealth involved in both hiding and searching -- non-geocachers are referred to as "muggles" and the idea is to not be obvious about searching for a cache so a muggle doesn't, say, walk off with the cache, or throw it out thinking it's trash, or be mean-spirited and tamper with the cache. I think really the only way this could happen other than pure chance would be if Meghan had been in contact with the person allegedly hiding the cache and they had made arrangements for her to try and find it, but I don't believe this is the case here.
