Home, Crafts and Hobbies Atlas

How Hands Make A Home
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Milestone

The First Geocache

Also Known As The Great American GPS Stash Hunt
First Competitive and Exhibition Events

The hobby began as a test of a technology change. One day after the United States turned off Selective Availability, the deliberate degradation of civilian GPS accuracy, computer consultant Dave Ulmer hid a black plastic bucket of small items in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon and posted its coordinates to an online GPS users' group, daring readers to find it with nothing but a receiver. He called it the Great American GPS Stash Hunt; within three days two different readers had found it, and by the end of the month the pursuit had been renamed geocaching to shed the word stash's unwanted connotations. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Milestone Year
2000 1
When
May 3, 2000, the day after GPS Selective Availability was switched off (Blue Switch Day), Dave Ulmer hid the first cache and posted its coordinates online. 1
Location
Beavercreek, Oregon 1
Connections

Associated With

Source Geocaching (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Geocaching (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
Quote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
The first documented placement of a GPS-located cache took place on May 3, 2000, by Dave Ulmer in Beavercreek, Oregon United States.
View the Source
Geocaching History (Geocaching.com)
Groundspeak, Inc.geocaching.com/about/history.aspx
Quote, geocaching.com/about/history.aspx
The Great American GPS Stash Hunt was redubbed geocaching by the end of May 2000 to avoid the negative connotations of the word stash.
View the Source

Take a Related Quiz

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.