What is geocaching?

So here it is, the what is geocaching post.

Geocaching is a world wide hi-tech adventure game of hide and seek. It’s the most expensive sport in the world. HA HA. The costs are out of this world. The beauty of it is though that governments have already spent billions to make the sport happen by launching sattelites. For us players the equipment for the sport only costs a little bit. You can get a basic hand held GPS unit for $100 or so.

The object of the game is for a hider to hide a cache. A cache is a small waterproof container to hold a log book, pencil and maybe some small trading items (SWAG). The hider posts the coordinates of the cache to the internet at a website like http://www.geocaching.com/ and all the seekers try to find it.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s one thing to know where the item is, it’s another to actually find it. Besides the sometimes long hikes to actually get to where the cache is, it could be hidden under a rock, in a tree trunk, in a hole in the ground. The cache could be large enough to contain lots of treasure, but it could also be as small as a 35 mm film canister.

Geocaching itself has only been around since 2000, after the removal of satellite selective availability from GPS, this allowed for greater accuracy. It is similar to letterboxing which has been around for about 150 years. In letterboxing a box is hidden and clues were left in magazines. Each hider and seeker had a stamp and a logbook. The hiders stamp was in the cache with their logbooks. The seeker stamped the hider’s logbook with their stamp and stamped their own logbook with the hiders stamp.

There are a few variations for geocaching. A few of the more popular ones are the traditional which includes at a minimum a log book, a multi cache where each cache holds the coordinates for the next one, an event cache which is an organized event for many cachers, a Cache In Trash Out event which is organized to remove garbage from an area, an earthcache where the idea is to learn about the geology of the area where the cache is found, and a new type called whereigo which is an interactive story game like Myst except it’s in the real world.

There are some ethics involved with geocaching as well. The number one concern is to protect the environment. With that in mind the coordinate hosts have rules that need to be followed before they will post coordinates of a cache.