Geocaching

I have a terrible time trying to describe geocaching.  If it comes up during casual conversation, someone will invariably ask “what’s geocaching?”  There’s always a momentary hesitation as I think “oh, no.  Here we go again.”  Then I’ll say something like “Well, it’s a sport..no, more of a recreation…no, it’s a … game…that you play by yourself…with a few million others around the globe.  First, someone hides a container, called a cache, somewhere and publishes its geographic coordinates on the website geocaching.com.  Then, the other players look up the cache, put the cache’s coordinates into their GPS, and go find it.  That’s it.”  About this point, I get blank stares or a long “Oooookay.”  What I’m never able to properly convey with this bald, technical description is the great fun geocachers have together out on the trail, the addictive nature of the hunt, particularly as your handheld GPS unit counts down the feet to the cache, and the wonderful places that I’ve found that I never would have discovered without geocaching.

Geocaching, of course, wouldn’t be possible without the Global Positioning System (GPS), a system of satellites orbiting the earth that allow anyone on the surface of the planet with a GPS receiver to determine their position with a high degree of accuracy.  The system requires line-of-sight with at least four satellites but is not affected by weather.  The U.S. Department of Defense developed and built the GPS system to improve on several older navigation systems. Development began in 1973 and the system was operational in 1994 with 24 satellites.  Originally, the system’s high-accuracy capability was restricted to military use with civilian uses limited by a “Selective Availability” policy that intentionally degraded the system’s accuracy to about 300 feet.  This changed when President Clinton ordered Selective Availability be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000.  Suddenly, anyone with a GPS receiver could use the GPS system to an accuracy of about 30 feet.

Two days later, on May 3, 2000, Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Oregon hid a black, plastic bucket filled with various trinkets, a notepad and a pen.  He posted its coordinates on the internet. By May 6, it was found twice and logged once.  Geocaching was born.  On May 8^th, Mike Teague announced a website for documenting the ‘stashes’.  Within a month, the basic rules of the game had been established and the name ‘geocaching’ was proposed by Matt Stum to avoid the negative connotations of the word ‘stash’.  In September 2000, Jeremy Irish announced that he had registered the domain geocaching.com and entered all the caches in Teague’s database into his.  The number of caches grew rapidly and more and more players entered the game as the price of hand-held GPS receivers fell.

Bunthorne nabs one in Sedona

In traditional geocaching, the cache owner hides a container and posts its coordinates on geocaching.com along with a description of the cache, its size, difficulty, and possibly a hint.  Containers can be enormous tubs and buckets, ammo boxes, plastic Tupperware, film canisters, and tiny micro caches barely big enough for a spool of paper.  The location can be anywhere on the planet from far out in the wilderness to the middle of a busy downtown.  There are certain locations that are prohibited including national parks, military bases, school property, and anywhere that the managing authority has prohibited geocaching.  The cache must contain a logbook and may contain ‘geoswag’ for trading.  The cache seekers look up the cache online, enter the coordinates into their GPS receiver, then go out and find the cache. They log their visit in the logbook, trade geoswag if they like, and return the cache to its hiding place.  On returning to the website, they log their ‘find’ and share their experience without revealing the location of the cache.  The website keeps track of the number of caches that each player has found.  These numbers become points of pride for more hardcore players.

There are several variations on the traditional geocache.   A multi-cache requires the seeker to go to several waypoints before finding the final cache location.  For a puzzle cache, the coordinates are not published on the cache page.  Instead, a puzzle must be solved to find the cache.  The virtual cache has no physical container but the finder usually has to observe something at the location, answer some questions, or have their picture taken and report back to the cache owner for credit.  Another aspect of the game is finding trackable items known as travel bugs and geocoins.  These trackables get moved from cache to cache to fulfill a mission or get them to a particular destination.

Today, there are over 1.3 million active geocaches hidden around the world with 4 million people looking for them. Geocaching gets you outside and introduces you to places you may not have known about.  Most geocachers would agree that the adventure of getting from their front door to the cache location is the real treasure.  If you’ve never done it, get yourself a GPS receiver and give it a try.  

Question of the Day: What is the minimum allowed distance between geocaches?