\n<\/p>\n
Bryan Roth had been hiking and scrambling for a while, with drop-offs evident around him, when his guides held out coveralls and pointed between two rocks. \u201cWe have to go in the hole,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n
Roth was standing at the edge of a cave in Pirkanmaa, Finland. Inside, he knew, was a geocache: a container that was stashed at a particular latitude and longitude and meant to be sought and found like treasure\u2014in this case, like buried treasure.<\/p>\n
Roth is claustrophobic, but still he climbed down\u2014into a cavern that led to another hole, which led to a subterranean room. A century before, his local guides said, women and children would hide from the Russians here. After continuing through a tight tunnel, Roth found the cache, signed his name in the log and got the hell out.<\/p>\n
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Roth is a geocacher\u2014a person who spends their spare time scouring Earth\u2019s gridded coordinates to find hidden objects. And he\u2019s not just an enthusiast\u2014he\u2019s president of Geocaching HQ, which runs Geocaching.com. Many hobbyists use this site to access a master list of geocaches and log their finds, which they can also do on an app.<\/p>\n
The hobby of geocaching is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. Though many have never heard of the pursuit, it\u2019s a game with millions of players around the world. There\u2019s almost certainly a secret array of geocaches all around you\u2014behind retaining walls you pass every day, under that bush on your street corner, deep inside a dead log at the local park and even at the top of the mountain on your horizon. And as GPS becomes ever more integral to our connected society, geocaching is evolving, too, using smartphones\u2019 capabilities to lead people on increasingly immersive and expansive adventures.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re not a geocacher, this beneath-surface world exists unnoticed. If you are a geocacher, the whole globe is stuffed with secrets that you can find thanks to satellite technology and its increasing integration into everyday life.<\/p>\n
Geocaching is possible because of GPS technology: the set of satellites whose signals can reveal the location of any receiving device down to a few yards. \u201cGPS started as a U.S. military program,\u201d says Brian Weeden, a space policy expert at the Aerospace Corporation\u2019s Center for Space Policy and Strategy. It was meant to help the Department of Defense navigate its ships, planes, land forces and weapons. If those moving things can receive signals from four or more GPS satellites at once, they can calculate their position based on the small difference in when those four-plus signals arrive. The same is true for a smartphone.<\/p>\n
The idea for GPS was inspired by Sputnik, the first satellite ever launched. Scientists realized they could use beeps from Sputnik to determine the satellite\u2019s location. \u201cAfter that, they realized you could reverse the process, and you could use it to track locations on the ground based on a moving signal in space,\u201d says Weeden, who recently wrote a report that analyzed GPS policy decisions throughout history.<\/p>\n
That vague idea eventually morphed into the DOD\u2019s GPS network, which is currently a constellation of 31 satellites.<\/p>\n
Despite GPS\u2019s military origins, its signals were always available to civilians, Weeden says. But the military initially inserted a deliberate error into those signals, fuzzing up regular people\u2019s positions by about 100 yards.<\/p>\n
In 1996 the U.S. government pledged to nix the uncertainty\u2014which it called \u201cselective availability\u201d\u2014within a decade. Uncharacteristically, it did so just four years later, in May 2000. And almost immediately after that, geocaching was born.<\/p>\n
At the time, GPS nerds hung out on the nascent Internet, chatting on newsgroups. When selective availability switched off, discussions were buzzing. Dave Ulmer was one of the amped-up Internet talkers. And right after selective availability switched off, he hid a container in the woods, posted its coordinates to one of these forums and waited for people to use their newly precise GPS devices to find his prize: a five-gallon bucket stuffed with map software, videos, books, food, money and a slingshot.<\/p>\n
Mike Teague found it just three days later. Intrigued by the idea, he offered to curate a public list of other caches, should anyone place them. They did, and people began to call the idea the Great American GPS Stash Hunt. Later, it was changed to \u201cgeocaching\u201d to avoid the vaguely illegal connotations of \u201cstash\u201d and the limitations of \u201cAmerican.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jon Stanley, currently a senior data scientist at Geocaching HQ, didn\u2019t start searching for caches right away. Initially there were none near him, but he did hide his own cache about a month after Ulmer, near a cabin his family had in Idaho. \u201cI want to take people to a place that they wouldn’t visit ordinarily,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
A man named Jeremy Irish, one of Roth\u2019s co-founders, came across this so-called stash hunt online and built a website to make the game more accessible, with assistance from Roth and another co-founder, Elias Alvord. Geocaching.com launched in September 2000 and pointed people to the 75 existing caches. \u201cWhen Mike Teague\u2019s online list went down in September 2000, he told everyone to visit Geocaching.com,\u201d says Roth.Some have criticized the site\u2019s co-founders for commercializing what had been an open-source game\u2014for instance, by selling merchandise and offering a subscription for premium membership.<\/p>\n
Since then geocaching has grown\u2014largely through that website and its affiliated app\u2014as GPS and handheld civilian technology have both evolved. \u201cThe biggest change for me is, at the start, everyone owned a dedicated GPS unit,\u201d Stanley says. Those early devices didn\u2019t even have maps. Now everyone has GPS-enabled maps in their pockets.<\/p>\n
One of the biggest innovations in GPS itself, Weeden says, is the growth in other satellite navigation systems\u2014such as Russia\u2019s GLONASS, Europe\u2019s Galileo and China\u2019s BeiDou. \u201cThat means a lot of devices these days, including your phone, can pull signals from all these constellations, which makes it easier to get a signal and can improve the accuracy,\u201d he says. These systems spit out common civil signals while maintaining separate military ones.<\/p>\n
With the combination of better GPS signals and smartphones, geocaching has pulled in not just tech heads but outdoor enthusiasts, people who want add fun to a road trip and those who just like exploring hidden parts of their neighborhood. Today there are millions of geocachers worldwide, and 3.4 million geocaches.<\/p>\n
Some, like the one Roth crawled toward in Finland, require special skills. Others call upon rock climbing gear, scuba equipment, kayaks and even helicopters. There\u2019s even a geocache on the International Space Station.<\/p>\n
Geocaching.com has also expanded the kinds of caches available. \u201cInstead of hiding boxes,\u201d Roth says, \u201cpeople are creating multistage, multimedia self-guided tours and experiences\u201d\u2014such as a tree tour at the University of Washington. \u201cWe believe every location has a story to tell,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Inside traditional container-style caches, objects have a story to tell, too. Some, like Ulmer\u2019s original, are the size of a big bucket. Others are weather-proof ammo boxes or coffee cans wrapped in duct tape. In these, people leave a paper logbook, as well as trinkets. If you find a cache, you may take a trinket if you leave a trinket; it\u2019s like a Little Free Library box for pins and bumper stickers.<\/p>\n
Some trinkets, called \u201ctravel bugs,\u201d are trackable using unique IDs. If a player finds one, they\u2019re supposed to move it to a new cache and log its new location online. Stanley created metal \u201cgeocoins\u201d whose hops across the globe can be tracked using the system.<\/p>\n
Geocachers also do good works, such as reporting coordinates from physical survey markers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A geocache even helped lost hikers in 2008; they accidentally found it and so were able to tell rescuers where they were. Other cachers discovered a remote, recent car crash while searching and helped save the driver.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not all nice stories, though. As with most hobbies, people have died geocaching\u2014falling into ravines, for instance.<\/p>\n
The GPS system itself isn\u2019t entirely safe either. Since GPS\u2019s start, new signals have been introduced, Weeden says, so satellites transmit multiple different signals at once\u2014four civilian ones and two military ones. The increase means more accuracy because receivers can compare and contrast them and find out if a given signal is being faked or manipulated. Military signals are even more resistant to interference and jamming, which is necessary because modern conflict, almost by definition, includes one group messing with another\u2019s global positioning signals, whether that means simply blocking signals or spoofing them so that the positions are off. That interference is much more consequential to, say, an aircraft pilot than it is to a geocacher, but it can happen to either one.<\/p>\n
So if you\u2019re out searching for a stashed cache, and your signal looks more like one from 1999 than 2005, you can just pay a little homage to those old days of selective availability and spend some time looking at wherever you happen to be, wondering what else might be hidden there and to whom it is special. \u201cGo for the experience,\u201d Stanley says. \u201cYou might find things that are disappointing, but keep at it, and you’ll start to see the magic in the places it takes you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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