Happy Birthday, Geocachers!

Did you know that in May of 2000 the "selective availability" was removed from the satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS)? Then President Bill Clinton made an announcement that the United States would stop the intentional degradation of the GPS signals and made them available to the public. This was a surprise as the original commitment for removing the selective availability had been for 2006. The tech community went wild with ideas on how to use the "instant upgrade" on their GPS units. Needless to say, at this time, GPS units were not widely available and only a handful of real dedicated techies (aka geeks) had any idea what this meant.

The first geocache was placed on May 3, 2000 by Dave Ulmer near Beaver Creek, Oregon. He called the idea the "Great American GPS Stash Hunt" and posted the coordinates of the "stash" at N 45° 17.460 W 122° 24.800 on a GPS users' group on the internet. Simple idea: hide something, publish coordinates. Simple rules: take some stuff, leave some stuff. Within 3 days 2 other users had found the information and posted about their experience finding the "stash" on the internet. Others followed suit and people started hiding things in their area for others to find.

Within that first month, Mike Teague started collecting and documenting coordinates of hides around the world on his web page. A mailing list was created to discuss the activity. In September 2000 the term "geocache" started to be used more regularly than "GPS Stash Hunt" when Mike Teague handed off the maintenance of the list of hides to Jeremy Irish. Jeremy founded the Geocaching web site and created a web site and tools to help improve the ability of people to find caches near them. At the time the site was published, there were 75 known caches in world.*

As with anything new, someone told someone, who told someone else. Even the media got wind of the new phenomenon. People wondered if anyone would bother to find a cache if they hid it. The dedicated people who were involved in the early days encouraged people to hide new stuff. And you know what? Once it was hidden, other people went and found it. New caches are hidden every day all around the globe. Wherever you go, you can take a GPS with you and find a treasure trove of stuff left behind in some cool, and some really hot, places around the world.

There's GPS units in our cars now. There might be one in your phone. There are handheld devices galore that can give you an instant global fix on your position. Get the coordinates to something nearby and go find it. It is hide-and-seek for everyone! Kids love it. And you know what? When you look for caches to find on the website you can select an option to make the cache kid friendly, or family friendly, or pet friendly, or findable at night, or 24 hours a day, or under water, or . . . you get the idea. I gotta find me one of those under water ones . . . hmm.

The nifty thing about it, you can still go and find the spot where the original cache was. There's a plaque and everything. Or you can go and find stuff near you. Whatever you do, remember the rules: take stuff, leave stuff according to the cache type and preferences. And one more thing, be environment friendly. If you take it in, take it out with you. If you take along a plastic bag, you can pick up the other trash left behind there too. That is another cool thing about geocaching. They call it CITO: Cache In, Trash Out. Not only is it fun, it's good for the environment. Yea, I like that.

*Source for history of Geocaching adapted from http://www.geocaching.com/about/history.aspx. They said it much better than I could.