Geocaching
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40 free Geocaching trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Geocaching turns the whole planet into a game board. Since the spring of 2000, players have used GPS coordinates to hide small containers and track down the ones other people have left, signing a logbook each time to prove they were there. Millions of caches now wait in city centres, on mountain trails and in a few places that are much harder to reach. This quiz covers the story of the first hide, the rules and etiquette every hider is expected to follow, the different cache types and sizes, trackables that hitchhike from cache to cache, and the slang that fills every logbook. A handful of questions look at the GPS system itself: who runs the satellites, how a receiver works out where it is, and how coordinates are written. It is pitched for anyone who has ever gone looking for a cache, from families on a first weekend hunt to players with thousands of finds, and it works well as a round for a club meet-up. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word from the Harry Potter books do geocachers use for a passer-by who does not play?
Muggle
Muggle is the word, and a cache that an unsuspecting non-player dismantles or carries off is said to have been muggled.
Q 02Dave Ulmer hid the first geocache in May 2000 near Beavercreek, a community in which US state?
Oregon
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.
Q 03Which tinned item, the only thing salvaged from the very first geocache, later became a trackable?
A can of beans
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.
Q 04Aboard which spacecraft did video game designer Richard Garriott hide a geocache in 2008?
The ISS
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.
Q 05Fourteen geocaching hides holding movie props were placed in 2001 to promote which film?
Planet of the Apes
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.
Q 06What kind of animal is Signal, the official Geocaching.com mascot who poses for photos at events?
A frog
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.
Q 07The first Travel Bug, released in 2001 and themed on a deadly sin, was attached to which toy?
A rubber duck
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.
Q 08Which US president had civilian GPS's deliberate error switched off, opening the way for geocaching?
Bill Clinton
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.
Q 09A geocache in Wetherby, England, got a busy street evacuated in 2011 when it was mistaken for what?
A bomb
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.
Q 10Which hobby, begun on Dartmoor in 1854 and likened to geocaching, hides a rubber stamp at each site?
Letterboxing
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.
Q 11Which way of hiding a cache do geocaching guidelines forbid unless a landowner explicitly allows it?
Burying
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.
Q 12Which everyday trade item is banned from geocaches even when sealed, under the hiding guidelines?
Food
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.
Q 13Every geocache carries two ratings on a five-point scale: one for difficulty and one for what?
Terrain
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.
Q 21A geocaching trackable code rides on which Mars rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater in 2021?
Perseverance
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.
Q 22Which car brand ran a geocaching contest from 2004 to 2007, sending out thousands of Travel Bugs?
Jeep
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.
Q 23Which GPS maker built the Chirp beacon for geocaches and ran the site OpenCaching.com until 2015?
Garmin
Q 14Which acronym does a geocacher log after searching for a cache and coming away empty-handed?
DNF
DNF stands for Did Not Find. The other three are happier notes: thanks for the cache, first to find, and took nothing, left nothing.
Q 15Which military-surplus container, sturdy and waterproof, is the gold standard for geocaches?
An ammo can
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.
Q 16Geocaching began as a GPS hunt for what, a word soon dropped for its negative connotations?
Stash
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.
Q 17Geocaching HQ, with an official cache for visitors, sits in the Fremont district of which city?
Seattle
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.
Q 18A cache's longitude is counted from the Prime Meridian, a line through which English site?
Greenwich
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.
Q 19What do geocachers gather up at CITO events, part of an initiative Geocaching HQ launched in 2002?
Litter
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.
Q 20The micro geocache size is officially described as about as big as which piece of old camera kit?
A film canister
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.
Garmin takes its name from founders Gary Burrell and Min Kao. Its coin-sized Chirp stores hints for nearby players and counts their visits.
Q 24Which item of street furniture hides so many urban caches under its base that it has an acronym?
A lamp post
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.
Q 25What does every GPS satellite carry so a geocacher's receiver can turn signal delay into distance?
Atomic clocks
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.
Q 26Which branch of the US military operates the GPS satellites that every geocacher relies on?
The Space Force
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.
Q 27Many geocaching receivers also read GLONASS, a satellite navigation system built by which country?
Russia
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.
Q 28The 'cache' in geocaching comes from which language, where the root verb means to hide?
French
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.
Q 29Which two-word term, shortened to GZ, means the spot where a geocacher's GPS says the cache is?
Ground zero
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.
Q 30Which legacy geocache type has no container, asking visitors to answer a question or take a photo?
Virtual Cache
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.