Geocaching - a challenging journey

| Sunday, January 8, 2012
By Tom Snow


Geocaching is a treasure hunting game in which the participants utilise a Global Positioning System receiver, portable device or other navigational techniques to hide and find the boxes anywhere in the world. Geocaching mixes being outside, puzzles, hunting and journey activities; everybody from youngsters to older can easily become involved because there is not any qualifications nor electronic expertises are required for this game.

A container sometime called cache is a little water-proof container having a log book where the geocacher enters the date and time they found it and signs it together with their code name. Bigger containers like plastic storage boxes or ammunition boxes also contain items for trading, food, toys, books and other surprises. These boxes are hidden out in the badlands, suburbs and even in middle of cities with hints that are supplied for players to uncover them.

Geocaches are at present placed in more than a hundred nations around the globe and in seven continents, including Antarctica . After more than 11 years of activity there could be over 1.5 million active geocaches released on assorted web sites and there may be more than 5 million geocachers worldwide.

Geocaching is comparable to the 150 year-old game called letterboxing, which is thought as an environment-friendly game, involving the hiding and discovery of letterboxes. Geocaching was started after improvement in the preciseness of the GPSs that provided for a tiny container to be exactly situated and found. The first documented placement of a Global Positioning System placed cache took place on May 3rd, 2000 by Dave Ulmer. According to Dave Ulmer message, the first stash was a black plastic bucket buried almost all of the way in the ground and contained software, videos, books, food, currency, and a slingshot.

The first Geocaching game was organized by www.gpsgames.org that lasted for two months in June and July, 2001. Players were encouraged to take photos at the dashpoints and also upload them to the site. There are some organisations that only want to play geocaching by using mobile devices. Nowadays, Android, iPhone, webOS, and Windows Phone-7 mobile platforms have numerous applications for geocaching. These applications also allow for a test version with a limited level of functionality.

Countless web sites list geocaches around the globe. In the US, where most of geocaching services are hosted, only a cache's coordinates are in public domain and other cache data is protected by copyright regulations. All the geocaching sites vary in their in active security for cache info. The first site to list geocaches was declared by Mike Teague on the 8th of May, 2000. On the 2nd of September, 2000, Jeremy Irish emailed the gpsstash mailing list that he had registered the site name as geocaching.com and setup this website. He copied the caches from Mike Teague's database into his own.

The major world internet sites that list geocashes are; www.geocaching.com, www.navicache.com, www.opencaching.com, www.terracaching.com, www.gpsgames.org and opencaching.com. In numerous countries there are regional geocaching sites, but these websites generally compile lists of caches in the area from the key sites. A lot of them also accept unique lists of caches for their site, but these lists are less popular than the worldwide sites and cover the regional info only.




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