Happy Birthday Geocaching!

Picked up a quick find this morning, the same type as the past few days. It was another rusty Altoids container.  I really like these cause the rust makes them feel older than they really are. This one was place only two years ago and has been found 98 times.

After work I picked up TJ and found out that Teri was working late.  I decided to go to a Geocaching event celebrating the 10 year of the ability to Geocache. It was a fun event and I got to meet some great people like friend of Dorothy and Scarecrow.   It was also great to see some of the people we met at the last event again. TJ got to play on a cool rocket park structure and eat some cake.  That was his favorite part.

Here is a brief history of Geocaching... On May 1, 2000, President Bill Clinton's executive order to discontinue "Selective Availability" allowing users to receive a non-degraded GPS signal globally was executed.

On May 2, 2000, at approximately midnight, eastern time, the switch controlling "Selective Availability" was thrown. Twenty-four satellites around the globe processed their new orders, and instantly the accuracy of GPS technology improved tenfold. Tens of thousands of GPS receivers around the world had an instant upgrade.

On May 3, 2000 Dave Ulmer placed the very first geocache, The Original Stash, a black bucket, in the woods near Beaver Creek, Oregon. Along with a logbook and pencil, he left various prize items including videos, books, software, a can of beans and a slingshot. He shared the waypoint of his "stash" with the online community on sci.geo.satellite-nav, and Geocaching was born.

On May 30, 2000 the word Geocaching was coined by Matt Stum on the "GPS Stash Hunt" mailing list. Geocache was the joining of two familiar words. The prefix geo, for Earth, was used to describe the global nature of the activity, but also for its use in familiar topics in gps such as geography. The word cache is described by Merriam-Webster as "a hiding place especially for concealing and preserving provisions or implements."

On Sept 2, 2000 Jeremy Irish launched the Geocaching.com web site with 75 caches. Later that same year Jeremy partnered with Elias Alvord and Bryan Roth, two coworkers at Sunrise Identity and started a new company called Groundspeak, Inc.

Mar 8, 2010 - 1,000,000th active geocache listed.