Geocaching FAQ

Even though some of us have been geocaching since 2000, it was not until 2005 that we had news articles appearing in New Zealand publications about geocaching. Recently these articles have been spotted.

• 20050214 High tech treasure hunting (TVNZ)
• 20050216 High-tech hide-and-seek (Stuff - will be archived soon)
• 20050304 Treasure hunts new GPS craze (NZ Herald)

There is no official geocaching organisation or website at this point in time, as there is no international organisation or association of geocachers that can grant such official status.

There are geocache directory sites that call themselves official, and whilst they may have a very comprehensive geocache listing services, they cannot claim to be official as there is no organisation to grant official status.

The New Zealand Recreational GPS Society does not claim to be an official geocaching organisation for the reason mentioned above, as well as only being able to represent a subset of geocachers in New Zealand.

There are two websites that provide comprehensive listings of New Zealand geocaches.

• gecaching.com (since Sep 2000)
• geocaching.com.au (since Dec 2004)

There are a number of other sites that list geocaches, but these currently do not have many New Zealand geocaches listed on them.

• NaviCache
• Geocaching at GPSGames

The first geocache in New Zealand was placed by Peter McKellar near Rotorua on the 12th May 2000 - this was in fact the first geocache placed outside of the United States! It was unfortunately trashed before anyone could find it.

Geocache by Peter McKellar (geocaching.com)

The first geocache in the South Island was place by Bob C on the 5th June 2000 southwest of Christchurch. It only had one successful log before being washed away in flooding.

Geocache by Bob C (geocaching.com)

On 1 MAY 2000, President Clinton announced that the US Department of Defence would disable Selective Availability on the Global Positioning System. This meant that civilian (as opposed to military) GPS units would see the error drop from 100's of metres down to around 5m. This meant that overnight a consumer GPS could be used to repeatedly return to the same co-ordinates (previously you could have been a couple of hundred metres out).

Two days later, Dave Ulmer in Oregon, USA went out and placed the first GPS stash - as they were called initially. Dave then went on to post a message to the sci.geo.satellite-nav newsgroup: -