Geocaching

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 20:33:00 -0400
/society

It seems I have been failing to pay attention because today was the first I heard of Geocaching and it’s already under attack.

From geocaching.com’s faq:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

It is deceptively easy. It’s one thing to see where an item is, it’s a totally different story to actually get there.

As for the attack:

“It’s good, clean, wholesome fun - just do it someplace else,” said Brian Adams, chief of resource protection for the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which has banned geocaching.

As someone without a GPS I can’t really appreciate the appeal but it seems likely to have some merit. The sense of community and reciprocation is warming but probably only exists because of the high cost of entry into the geocaching world. What makes it particularly interesting is that it heralds the start of the descriptive markup of the physical world.