The website

Sorta scavenger hunt, sorta treasure hunt, it's kind of a nifty idea. All you need is some sort of GPS, and the rest is just there.

As of today, there are 40380 active caches in 161 countries.
The cache is basically the treasure, and these things are all over the place.

I think it's interesting to know that this sort of huge thing can go on without too much attention. (There are even caches hidden at disneyland)

Anyway, visit the site... they explain it a hell of a lot better than I do.



A little history:

When the GPS signal degradation called Select Availabilty (SA) was removed by the Clinton Administration May 1st, 2000 (statement), it opened up the possibility of games like this one.

On May 3rd, a container of goodies was hidden by a someone outside of Portland, Oregon - in celebration of the removing of Selective Availability. By May 6th the cache was visited twice, and logged in the logbook once.

Mike Teague was the first to find the container, and built the first web site to document these containers and their locations that were posted to the sci.geo.satellite-nav newsgroup.

In July of 2000, Jeremy Irish found Mike Teague's web site and found his first cache outside of Seattle, Washington. Recognizing the potential of the game (but never expected the growth), Jeremy approached Mike Teague with a new site design, used the name Geocaching, and developed a new web site adding virtual logs, maps, and a way to make it easier to maintain caches as the sport grows. The site was alive for a while, but the official torch was passed to Jeremy on September 6.

Since the launch of the web site, the Geocaching sport has grown to caches in all 50 states and over 100 countries. There are now many variations of the game, including virtual caches, offset caches, puzzle caches, and multi-stage caches. New ideas and new great games crop up every day.

From its inception, Geocaching.com has been developed and maintained by Jeremy, with the assistance of Geocachers around the world. Many thanks to the Geocaching community for making the game it is today. The official web site for Geocaching is Geocaching.com.

Who knows where it'll go next!

Update! - Even earlier, Nuuksion Metsäsissit, initially Metsäsissit, had been hunting locations in the Greater Helsinki, Finland, area based on coordinates since the 1980s. Although they used 1:20,000 maps and half-a-millimeter measurement accuracy which gives 10-meter accuracy for the location, they started to use GPS in the early 1990's to determine accuracy. In many ways this was a precursor to geocaching (Information provided by Mesu)

i remember seeing something about that on the news. the idea seems pretty cool, especially if you're just down to just hike around all day, but i think when they showed it on the news, they only found like a bottle of water and some other lame shit.

the part where i have to buy some expensive gps thing to find lame shit doesn't really turn my buttons. i could do the same thing by rummaging around my closet.