History

Geocaching was made possible by the "turning off" of the selective availability of the Global Positioning System on May 1, 2000. The first documented placement of a cache with GPS assistance took place on May 3, 2000, by Dave Ulmer of Beaver Creek, Oregon. The location was posted on the Usenet newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. By May 6, 2000, it had been found twice and logged once (by Mike Teague of Vancouver, Washington).

There are hundreds of thousands of geocaches around the world, registered on various Web sites devoted to geocaching.