Why did geocaching start on May 3, 2000?
For most of the 1990s the United States military deliberately blunted its own satellites for everyone outside the Pentagon. The feature was called Selective Availability, and it added error to the civilian Global Positioning System signal so that hostile forces could not use American satellites to aim anything.
President Bill Clinton ordered it turned off on May 1, 2000. "The decision to discontinue Selective Availability is the latest measure in an ongoing effort to make GPS more responsive to civil and commercial users worldwide," the White House statement said that day. The degradation stopped a few minutes after midnight, so by May 2, 2000 every civilian receiver on Earth had gotten sharper overnight.
GPS.gov puts the size of the jump at accuracy going from within 100 meters, about 300 feet, to within 20 meters, about 60 feet. That is the difference between knowing which city block you are standing on and knowing which tree you are standing under, and it is the reason a treasure hunt built on coordinates suddenly worked.
Two days after the switch, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer drove into the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon, with a black five-gallon bucket.
What was in Dave Ulmer's original bucket?
Ulmer hid the bucket on May 3, 2000 and posted its coordinates to a Usenet newsgroup where GPS hobbyists traded readings. Inside were a logbook and pencil, mapping software, videos, books and a slingshot. The instruction he posted alongside the coordinates is still the rule the whole activity runs on: "Take some stuff, leave some stuff."
Mike Teague, reading in Washington state, drove down, found the bucket, signed the log and built a web page that listed every stash hidden after it. For a few months that page was the entire hobby: a few dozen engineers and hikers, one volunteer database, no company.
The name arrived on May 30, 2000, when Matt Stum proposed "geocaching" on the GPS Stash Hunt mailing list, on the grounds that the word stash carried the wrong associations. That rename is the reason anyone can find the activity in a search engine at all.
The original bucket did not survive. It was damaged beyond repair, and Geocaching HQ now marks the spot in Beavercreek with a plaque and an ammo can that holds the logbook. It is one of the most visited coordinates in the hobby.
How did Geocaching.com take over the hobby?
Jeremy Irish, a web developer in Seattle, found Teague's page in the summer of 2000, bought a handheld receiver, went looking for a cache and did not stop. He offered to take the listings off Teague's hands, then launched Geocaching.com on September 2, 2000 with the 75 caches known to exist anywhere in the world.
Irish built the site with Bryan Roth and Elias Alvord under a company called Groundspeak. What they wrote was a database, a map and a search interface, nothing more ambitious than that. Users did everything else: cache owners buy the containers, pick the spots and maintain them, volunteer reviewers approve each listing, and finders write the logs.
That division of labor is why one small Seattle office could run a worldwide activity, and it is also why the platform outlasted its peers. Geocaching.com is one of the few sites from that era still running under its original owner, and the reason is structural: the expensive part of the product was never on its servers.
Is geocaching still around in 2026?
Yes, and by every number the company publishes it is larger now than during the press coverage of the mid-2000s. Geocaching HQ counts more than 3.4 million active caches, hidden in 191 countries and on all seven continents, Antarctica included.
More than 361,000 people own at least one of those caches. Since 2000 the site has recorded more than 1.2 billion "Found it" and "Event Attended" logs, and geocachers still gather at more than 59,000 registered events a year. Geocaching.com is published in 24 languages.
What has not changed in 26 years is the loop. Somebody hides a container and publishes the coordinates, somebody else walks out and finds it, both of them sign the same paper logbook, and the platform records that it happened. The barrier to a first find in 2026 is a free app and a dry afternoon.
Who owns Geocaching.com, and what does it cost?
Groundspeak, Inc., which does business as Geocaching HQ, owns and operates Geocaching.com. The company is privately held and based in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, and the copyright line at the bottom of the site still reads Groundspeak, Inc., 26 years after Jeremy Irish, Bryan Roth and Elias Alvord started it. There is no parent conglomerate in this story, which makes it unusual among the survivors of 2000.
The money comes from subscriptions rather than advertising. Basic play is free: a free account and the official app reach most caches on the map. Geocaching Premium has cost $39.99 a year or $6.99 a month for new subscribers since June 6, 2023, and it adds advanced search, member-only caches and instant notification when a new cache appears nearby.
Charging a minority of users while keeping the core free was an odd model in 2001, years before app stores made it standard, and it is why the site never took the advertising route that consumer mapping sites chose.
Did smartphones kill geocaching?
Smartphones killed the dedicated receiver for most people and left the activity standing. Geocaching HQ shipped an official smartphone app while Apple's App Store was still new, and that app is free to download today, with the paid features layered on top of it.
What the phone changed was who plays. A phone is fine in a city park with a cell signal and a charged battery, so the app brought in casual finders who would never have bought a standalone GPS unit. Deep woods, cold, rain and all-day walks are still handheld country, which is why Garmin's eTrex line is still on sale with Geocaching Live support built into it.
Geocaching HQ also built a second game for the phone. Its Adventure Lab app sends players from location to location with no container to hide, maintain or replace, which removes the one job that limits how fast the map can fill in. Read that as a company treating the phone as a distribution channel rather than an obituary.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is geocaching still around in 2026?
Yes. Geocaching is still active in 2026, and Geocaching HQ lists more than 3.4 million active geocaches in 191 countries, owned by more than 361,000 people. The game has run continuously since Dave Ulmer hid the first cache in Oregon on May 3, 2000.
Who owns Geocaching.com now?
Geocaching.com is owned and operated by Groundspeak, Inc., a privately held company in Seattle that does business as Geocaching HQ. Groundspeak was started in 2000 by Jeremy Irish, Bryan Roth and Elias Alvord, and it launched Geocaching.com on September 2, 2000 with 75 caches listed.
How much does geocaching cost in 2026?
Geocaching is free to play: a basic Geocaching.com account and the official app cost nothing. Geocaching Premium, which adds advanced search, member-only caches and instant notifications, has cost $39.99 a year or $6.99 a month for new subscribers since June 6, 2023.