advertisement
How did geocaching start?
Sun, 2005-02-27 01:40 — rediguana
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: -
Well, I did it, created the first stash hunt stash and here are the coordinates:
N 45 17.460
W122 24.800
Lots of goodies for the finders. Look for a black plastic bucketburied most of the way in the ground. Take some stuff, leave some stuff! Record it all in the log book. Have Fun!
Stash contians: Delorme Topo USA software, videos, books, food, money, and a slingshot!
By the 6th of May the new GPS stash had been visited twice.
The first visitor to the stash was Mike Teague, who then went and built the first website dedicated to listing what were to be geocaches. This website was opened on the 8th or May 2000.
An interesting point for New Zealand is that we had the first stash placed outside of the United States - this was placed on the 12th of May.
On the 15th of May, James Coburn created a Yahoo! group for the GPS Stash hunt. However, later that month Matt Stum suggested a move away from 'stash', and that cache was a more appropriate term.
In early September, Jeremy Irish - with Mike Teague's permission - announced that he had created a geocache directory service at geocaching.com. This web site has since grown to become the most comprehensive geocache directory in the world.