40 Fun Facts About Geocaching

Which word from the Harry Potter books do geocachers use for a passer-by who does not play?

Muggle is the word, and a cache that an unsuspecting non-player dismantles or carries off is said to have been muggled.

Dave Ulmer hid the first geocache in May 2000 near Beavercreek, a community in which US state?

Oregon it was: Ulmer left the container in woods near Portland a day after GPS signals were sharpened, then posted its coordinates online. Two people found it within three days.

Which tinned item, the only thing salvaged from the very first geocache, later became a trackable?

A can of beans was all that survived after a lawn mower wrecked the original cache. Renamed the Original Can of Beans, it was put on show at a 2012 geocoin gathering.

Aboard which spacecraft did video game designer Richard Garriott hide a geocache in 2008?

The ISS cache waited five years for its first finder: NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio logged it in November 2013. Garriott also left a Travel Bug that clocked over 350 million miles in orbit.

Fourteen geocaching hides holding movie props were placed in 2001 to promote which film?

Planet of the Apes got the series, placed with 20th Century Fox and known as Project A.P.E. Its backstory imagined scientists revealing an Alternative Primate Evolution.

What kind of animal is Signal, the official Geocaching.com mascot who poses for photos at events?

A frog named Signal fronts the game, and a special cache launched in 2020 could be logged only with a photo taken beside him. More than 22,000 players managed it.

The first Travel Bug, released in 2001 and themed on a deadly sin, was attached to which toy?

A rubber duck with devil horns, named Deadly Duck: Envy, carried the first tag. Geocaching co-founder Jeremy Irish followed it with six more Travel Bugs, one for each of the other deadly sins.

Which US president had civilian GPS's deliberate error switched off, opening the way for geocaching?

Bill Clinton's order ended Selective Availability early on 2 May 2000, sharpening civilian receivers roughly tenfold overnight. The first cache was hidden a day later.

A geocache in Wetherby, England, got a busy street evacuated in 2011 when it was mistaken for what?

A bomb was feared, so army bomb disposal experts sent in a robot to blow up the harmless box. Scares like this are why hiders are urged to label their containers clearly.

Which hobby, begun on Dartmoor in 1854 and likened to geocaching, hides a rubber stamp at each site?

Letterboxing began when a Dartmoor guide left a bottle for visiting cards at remote Cranmere Pool. Finders now print each site's stamp in their own notebook as proof of the visit.

Which way of hiding a cache do geocaching guidelines forbid unless a landowner explicitly allows it?

Burying a cache is out because no finder should have to dig: the guidelines forbid making any hole in the ground. Ironically, the very first cache sat partly sunk in the earth.

Which everyday trade item is banned from geocaches even when sealed, under the hiding guidelines?

Food is banned along with anything scented, because the smell draws animals to the container. The guidelines also rule out things that melt, such as crayons and lip balm.

Every geocache carries two ratings on a five-point scale: one for difficulty and one for what?

Terrain is the second rating, covering the physical effort of reaching the spot, while difficulty measures the mental challenge of the find. A D5/T5 cache is the hardest of all.

Which acronym does a geocacher log after searching for a cache and coming away empty-handed?

DNF stands for Did Not Find. The other three are happier notes: thanks for the cache, first to find, and took nothing, left nothing.

Which military-surplus container, sturdy and waterproof, is the gold standard for geocaches?

An ammo can shrugs off rain, animals and fire, has room for trade items, and is cheap to buy. Owners must cover any military markings so nobody mistakes it for something dangerous.

Geocaching began as a GPS hunt for what, a word soon dropped for its negative connotations?

Stash was the original word: Dave Ulmer called his idea the Great American GPS Stash Hunt. Matt Stum coined the replacement name on a mailing list on 30 May 2000.

Geocaching HQ, with an official cache for visitors, sits in the Fremont district of which city?

Seattle is where founder Jeremy Irish worked as a web developer when he built the site in 2000. The cache inside the headquarters has since logged more than 22,000 finds.

A cache's longitude is counted from the Prime Meridian, a line through which English site?

Greenwich marks zero degrees longitude, and the lines of longitude spread widest at the Equator before meeting at the poles. Latitude lines never touch: each degree is about 69 miles from the next.

What do geocachers gather up at CITO events, part of an initiative Geocaching HQ launched in 2002?

Litter is the target: CITO stands for Cache In Trash Out, and volunteers have bagged more than eight million litres of rubbish since it began. Some events also pull up invasive plants.

The micro geocache size is officially described as about as big as which piece of old camera kit?

A film canister is the yardstick for a micro, which often holds nothing but a rolled-up log sheet. Smaller still is the unofficial nano, about the size of a pencil eraser.

A geocaching trackable code rides on which Mars rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater in 2021?

Perseverance carries the code on a disc of prototype helmet-visor material, part of a calibration target on its robotic arm. Players could log it once the rover's camera sent back a photo.

Which car brand ran a geocaching contest from 2004 to 2007, sending out thousands of Travel Bugs?

Jeep tied its Travel Bugs to a sweepstakes with three real vehicles as prizes. Each year's batch came in a new colour: yellow, then white, green and red.

Which GPS maker built the Chirp beacon for geocaches and ran the site OpenCaching.com until 2015?

Garmin takes its name from founders Gary Burrell and Min Kao. Its coin-sized Chirp stores hints for nearby players and counts their visits.

Which item of street furniture hides so many urban caches under its base that it has an acronym?

A lamp post with an unsecured base cover is such a common hiding place that cachers simply call the result an LPC, short for lamp post cache.

What does every GPS satellite carry so a geocacher's receiver can turn signal delay into distance?

Atomic clocks keep the satellites in step, so a receiver can time each radio signal and work out how far away its sender is. Relativity makes them gain 38 microseconds a day, which is corrected.

Which branch of the US military operates the GPS satellites that every geocacher relies on?

The Space Force took over the constellation from the Air Force when it was created in 2019. Its crews keep at least 24 satellites working so that a receiver can see four or more from almost anywhere.

Many geocaching receivers also read GLONASS, a satellite navigation system built by which country?

Russia's GLONASS grew out of Soviet work begun in 1976. A receiver that reads it alongside GPS sees more satellites, so it fixes a position faster among tall buildings.

The 'cache' in geocaching comes from which language, where the root verb means to hide?

French gave English the word through trappers in Canada, who used it for a hiding place for stores and provisions. Computing later borrowed it for fast temporary memory.

Which two-word term, shortened to GZ, means the spot where a geocacher's GPS says the cache is?

Ground zero is where the device reads zero feet to go, but the search is rarely over: consumer GPS is only accurate to about five metres.

Which legacy geocache type has no container, asking visitors to answer a question or take a photo?

Virtual Cache listings send players to a notable place rather than a box, so there is no logbook to sign. New ones appear only in occasional limited releases.

Munzee, a game launched in Texas in 2011 and likened to geocaching, sends players hunting for what?

QR codes on weatherproof stickers stand in for the logbook: scanning one with the app proves the find. The name comes from Münze, the German word for coin.

Geohashing, a geocaching cousin that sends players to random coordinates, began in which webcomic?

XKCD's strip number 426 laid out the algorithm, and the game has since drawn more than 1,000 players. The Python programming language even ships a hidden version of the formula.

Groundspeak, the firm behind Geocaching.com, funded its first hosted servers by selling 144 of what?

T-shirts with a geocaching design raised enough for the three founders to move their machines off a home DSL line. All three kept their day jobs while running the site in their off hours.

What unusual job title is given to employees of Groundspeak, the company that runs Geocaching.com?

Lackeys is the title for paid staff, who often sit on panels at big events beside the volunteer reviewers who check new caches.

Hints on Geocaching.com cache pages are scrambled with which simple cipher that swaps A for N?

ROT13 rotates every letter thirteen places, so running it twice restores the original text. That makes one key enough to both hide and reveal a hint.

What name does Geocaching.com give a gathering attended by at least 5,000 people?

Giga-Event crowds are rare enough to draw geocachers from all over the world. The tier below it needs 500 or more attendees.

Southern Bowl, a geocache placed in 2001 to promote a film, is in which South American country?

Brazil's Southern Bowl outlasted nearly all of its thirteen siblings: most were archived within a few years, and by 2023 only one other was still active.

EarthCaches swap the box for an earth science lesson; which body runs them with Geocaching HQ?

Geological Society of America reviewers, nicknamed geoawares, vet every new listing. US national parks that barred physical caches welcomed these container-free lessons.

The world's oldest geocache still active lies near the tiny community of Mingo in which US state?

Kansas claims the record thanks to a cache placed near Mingo, a community so small that its post office closed in 1940.

Which geodetic datum does Geocaching.com use by default for cache coordinates, as GPS receivers do?

WGS84, the World Geodetic System of 1984, is the model of the Earth that GPS itself relies on. Cache coordinates are written as degrees and decimal minutes, the standard on handheld receivers.