Last month, at the insistence of Suyog we finally managed to track down our first Geocache.
I first learned about geocaching while reading a book called ‘Maphead’ by Ken Jennings. It is must read book for geography and map lovers.
Geocaching is an outdoor game where people use GPS to hide and locate containers called geocaches at specific locations with marked coordinates. Geocaching’s origins are quite interesting.
Till 2000, even though the GPS system in the United States was capable of locating a GPS holder’s position on earth within a few metres of accuracy it was intentionally scrambled by the Government due to National Security reasons. This ‘Selective Availability’ as it was called was finally turned off on 01 May 2000. All the GPS receivers instantly became 10 times more accurate. Dave Ulmer, a computer consultant in Portland, Oregon had stayed up all night to see the change in his GPS receiver. On seeing the change in accuracy from 100 metres to around 10 he was mighty excited and thought this would make a nice game of hide and seek. And so he hid the first ever geocache nearby his house and shared the coordinates on an internet GPS forum for other members to find. Within a day another enthusiast searched and located his cache. And so the game of Geocache was born. It soon exploded all over the world.
Geocaches are now spread out all over the world. Theres one in Vatican and one in the temples of Angkor Vat and another in McMurdo Station in Antartica. For a period of time there was an extraterritorial geocache too. The GC1BE91 was in the International Space Station from 2008 to 2017.
There are some legendary geocaches too like a cache called Psycho Urban Cache #13, a West Virginia cache that was dropped from a helicopter into the Potomac River.
Our first geocache hunt was nothing like the exotic ones mentioned here. Ours was located in a park near our home. We went to the place and using the clues found out the small container. It contained a log of all the people who had found it before us. Stupidly enough we did not bring a pen with us so we were content to just take a pic and leave the container back in its place.
