The Geocaching Explosion-A GPS & Web-based Treasure Hunt
As of today, there are 414,424 active geocaches worldwide. In the last 7 days, there have been 286,236 new logs written by 41,903 Geocache.com account holders.
Geocaching a high-tech spin-off of hide-and-seek, is a combination of old-school pirate treasure hunt with GPS devices and the Internet helping track down the booty. Players hide a cache, called microcaches, usually a waterproof container with a logbook and a handful of prizes inside, post coordinates and clues on the Web, and the hunt begins.
Armed with a handheld GPS unit, other players track down the cache and replace some of the treasure—with gifts for the next cache hunter. Aside from the logbook, common cache contents are unusual coins or currency, small toys, ornamental buttons, CDs, or books. Also common are objects that are moved from cache to cache, such as travel bugs or geocoins, whose travels may be logged and followed online.
Geocaching was born on May 1, 2000, when the Clinton administration removed a satellite scrambler that limited civilian GPS units' accuracy to 100 meters, upping their precision to within ten meters of a sought-after spot. Two days later, former computer engineer Dave Ulmer hid the first cache near Portland, Oregon—with contents including a can of beans and a $5 bill—and posted the details to an online newsgroup. Within a day, the stash was found, and the spark was ignited.
Today more than 750,000 people are hiding and searching out caches from Finland to Seattle, and clubs of geocachers are cropping up around the world. Most people post their caches and finds on the website Geocaching.com.
Microcaches are often placed in 35-millimeter film canisters in urban locations, others require bushwhacking, serious route-finding, or even multi-part hunts that involve phone calls and library sleuthing to unravel the puzzle.
On the Geocaching.com website, the difficulty of the find itself and surrounding terrain are ranked, so that you can choose how tough you want your quest to be. A hunt for a cache could mean a three-mile hike up Washington State's Mount Rainier, a trek through San Francisco's Presidio Heights, a rock climb in New Mexico, or a stroll across through Oxford with Kings College Clock with as your wayfinder.
Posted by Jason McManus.
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First paragraph says, "In the last 7 days, there have been 286,236 new logs written by 41,903 Geocache.com account holders."
Note, Geocache.com is not a functional website. The actual site is geocaching.com
Posted by: Anonymous | June 19, 2007 at 12:03 PM