Before 2000, other than for military use, GPS use was in its infancy. The system had been built by the American military, for use by their troops and equipment, and civilian equipment had an enforced margin of error, to restrict the accuracy. This artificial error (called Selective Availability), was switched off in May 2000, and an American by the name of Dave Ulmer realised that this meant that your average person could use GPS to both hide and find items to a reasonable degree of accuracy. On May 3rd, 2000, he hid a 'stash' in Oregon, in the US, and posted the coordinates on the internet. It was first found by another American, Mike Teague, just a few days later. This was the beginning of geocaching!
Geocaching.com
More 'stashes' were hidden over the next few months, and Mike Teague published a list of all the stash coordinates. Things started getting organised in September of the same year, when Jeremy Irish registered the domain name 'geocaching.com' and hosted Mikes stash listings. Jeremy eventually formed a company (Groundspeak), along with two other friends (Elias Alvord and Bryan Roth) to manage geocaching.com, and it's now a fully fledged business, employing over 40 staff.
Present Day
Currently there are over 1.6 million active geocaches, and over 5 million active participants. It's a hobby or activity that is growing dramatically. It is played in over 100 countries around the world, and there are caches hidden on every continent, even Antarctica.
Listing Sites
There are now multiple listing sites, but geocaching.com is the most popular by far. Players use the site to track their statistics, and for many cachers, it's 'all about the numbers'. For most beginners, the geocaching.com site is the best place to start their caching career.
Go on, look up a cache, go out and find it, and start your geocaching hobby!
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