A worldwide treasure hunt: participants hide watertight containers, post their coordinates online, and others find them by GPS and signed logbook. Millions of active caches now hide in plain sight on every continent, making it the youngest hobby in this atlas and one of the most widespread. 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
Established When (Circa)May 2000, days after the United States ended Selective Availability degradation of civilian GPS; the first cache was placed near Beavercreek, Oregon by Dave Ulmer 1 Connections
Associated With
Benchmark hunting is commonly practiced through the same geocaching community and tools.
Geohashing was invented as a variant of geocaching, borrowing its GPS-coordinate-hunting format but generating a new random target location each day.
Letterboxing predates and directly inspired geocaching, and the two hobbies share overlapping communities and, often, overlapping hidden containers.
Munzee is a location-based scavenger hunt game developed as a smartphone-driven variant of geocaching, using QR-coded tags in place of physical logbooks.
Orienteering's navigation skills and community substantially overlap with geocaching.
Source Geocaching (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Geocaching (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationIntroduction, second sentence, naming the first geocache placement dateQuote, Introduction, second sentence, naming the first geocache placement date
The first geocache was placed in May 2000, and as of 2023 there were over three million active caches worldwide.
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