What's it all about?
So, what is this thing called "geocaching" anyway?
Geocaching is an adventure sport where participants use handheld GPS receivers to hunt for hidden "caches" around the world.
GPS stands for Global Positioning System, a bunch of satellites circling the earth that use triangulation to pinpoint exact locations and elevations on the surface. Actually, before May 1, 2000 only groups like the US military machine could get accurate readings. The rest of the populace had to settle for purposefully degraded readings that really weren't accurate at all.
This all changed on May 1, 2000 when the Clinton administration discontinued the intentional degradation of GPS signals to meet its goal to "encourage acceptance and integration of GPS into peaceful civil, commercial and scientific applications worldwide."
Two days later, the first "cache" was placed. By May 6 the cache had been found twice. In July of the same year Jeremy Irish, the founder of the geocaching.com web site entered the picture. Just over 5 years later, in August 2005, there are almost 200,000 caches hidden in 217 countries around the world! If those figures don't speak directly to the incredible popularity of the game, nothing does.
Feel free to explore our geocaching pages here on clements.on.ca and get a feel for this fun family sport. If you want to get into geocaching, or just learn more, the best thing to do is head straight over to geocaching.com and sign up. Everything you need is waiting there. Have fun!
The links above are provided for convenience, and each will open in a new window. But you really only need to open the first one, as they all go to the same place.
