Is geocaching still a thing? A bucket in the woods, twenty-six years later

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Around midnight Eastern time on May 2, 2000, the United States government flipped a switch and the satellites stopped lying.

They had been lying on purpose. The GPS system was built for the military, and for years the Pentagon had scrambled the civilian signal just enough that your handheld receiver would put you somewhere within a hundred meters of where you actually stood, a precaution against the wrong people knowing exactly where things were. The policy was called Selective Availability. Geocachers still call the night it ended Blue Switch Day. Overnight, the accuracy of every consumer GPS unit on earth improved tenfold, and a certain kind of person, the kind who reads satellite-navigation newsgroups at midnight, started to wonder what you could do with that.

Dave Ulmer, a computer consultant outside Portland, took one day to find out. On May 3 he hid a five-gallon bucket in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon, and posted the coordinates. Inside were map software, videos, books, some food, a little money, and a slingshot. The rule he wrote down was simple enough to survive twenty-six years unchanged: take something, leave something, sign the log. Within three days it had been found twice. Within a month there were caches in California, Kansas, Illinois, and Australia, and a man named Matt Stum had suggested that "GPS stash hunt" sounded a little like something you'd get arrested for, and proposed "geocaching" instead. By September, when Geocaching.com went live, there were seventy-five of them in the world.

There are now 3.4 million. On the twenty-fifth anniversary, Geocaching HQ says one was placed on Mars.

So: yes. It is still a thing. The question people are really asking when they type that into a search bar is a different one, and I think it's this: is it still a thing for me? I was a kid in Idaho when this started.

What I remember is not the trinkets. Nobody remembers the trinkets. What I remember is the last hundred feet, when the arrow on the receiver stops being useful and you have to actually look at the world: this stump, that fence post, the one rock that is slightly too neatly placed. Geocaching's genius was never the GPS. It was that the GPS gets you close and then abandons you, and the abandonment is the point. You are forced to be somewhere, paying attention.

That's the part we borrowed. trouvé places drops at real spots on a map, and you have to be there, in range, to claim one. There is no container. Nothing to sign, nothing to muggle, no tupperware under a log for a maintainer to replace every spring. What's inside is a reward from a local business, a cookie, a pint, a plant, or Zapp, our points, with a chance at a gift card. We call it drop hunting. Some geocachers who've tried it call it dropcaching, and we've decided we don't mind.

The part we did not borrow, and could not, is the twenty-six years. There is a community out there with half a million events behind it and a cache on another planet. We have a map of one Montana town and a few hundred people who use it. The honest comparison is on our site, where we say in plain words what geocaching does better, because it does several things better and pretending otherwise would be an insult to the bucket.

But I'll say this for the bucket. Dave Ulmer's rule was take something, leave something. Ours is simpler and, I'd argue, a little more Montana: go there, and the thing is yours. The trade already happened. A business in your own town decided you were worth a cookie if you'd walk through the door.

Twenty-six years ago a man put a slingshot in the woods to see if anyone would come. People are still coming. We just moved the bucket downtown.