Geocaching Topics

• The basics
• Blending in

Geocaching: the Sport of Nerds

The global positioning satellite system was a natural outgrowth of the space race. Between 1973 and 2002, the US Department of Defense spent over $6 billion, not including launches and receivers, putting in orbit a network of satellites that could tell a receiver on the ground precisely where it stood in relation to those latitude, longitude thingies. Then the signal was deliberately scrambled a little, so that non-military receivers were only accurate to within 100 yards or so.

On May 1, 2000, President Clinton announced that this scrambling would cease, bringing civilian GPS receiver accuracy to a much more interesting 10 yards. On May 2, it was so. Dave Ulmer, a poster to the Usenet group sci.geo.satellite-nav, thought it would be cool to celebrate by hiding a bucket of stuff outside Portland, Oregon and posting the coordinates to the group. He did so on May 3, filling the bucket with such highly desirable objects as a book by Ross Perot and a can of blackeyed peas. On May 4, Mike Teague found it. By May 5, there was an FAQ. By August, there were 40 buckets of junk in 8 countries. And by September, everyone broke into tribes and started a war. Behold, geocaching!

Eh. Whatever. It grew. And expanded. And acquired an official name. And developed traditions and procedures and rules. Tips and techniques. Stars and villains. It has a jargon. And social events. But it's still about finding a box of junk using those latitude and longitude thingies.

Today — Monday, February 21, 2005 — is my one year caching anniversary. And at this moment, geocaching.com, the largest cache listing site, has a database of 144,320 caches in 213 countries (I didn't know there were 213 countries! Did somebody reinvent Africa again?). In the last week, there have been 82,383 logs written by 15,900 subscribers.

Man, that's a lot of nerds!