Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of inaccuracy on his screen, the next—hey presto!—he had only thirty. That difference, he
knew, would have meant a lot to him two months previously. In March, he'd been snow-
mobilingtothepeakofMountSaintHelens,tryingtofollowatrailhe'dtakenoncebefore.
But selective availability led him one hundred yards off course, and he shot out over an
ice ridge he wasn't expecting. “I slid down one side of the mountain on my back, and the
machine went down the other side of the mountain, end over end, and got demolished. It
was quite an eye-opening experience about what three hundred feet can do to you.”
Seeing his signal converge on his home that May night was like putting on a pair of eye-
glasses after enduring a lifetime of astigmatism. Later, lying in bed, he was too excited to
sleep. The scrambled GPS of the 1990s could tell you that you were in a football stadium
(which, if you
were
in a football stadium, you probably already knew) but the new tech-
nology could tell you exactly which yard marker you were standing on, and that opened
new horizons. What wonderful things can we do now with GPS? he remembers thinking.
There's got to be something that human beings have never done before until this moment
in time. “And that,” he says, “is when I invented geocaching.”
The next morning, Ulmer began gathering supplies. On a woodland turnout by the side
of a winding hillside road a mile from his home, he pulled over and half buried a five-
gallon bucket containing a notebook where finders could sign their names, four dollars in
cash,
George of the Jungle
on VHS, a Ross Perot topic, mapping software, the handle of a
Internet newsgroup for GPS users. That first announcement was startlingly prophetic, en-
visioning in detail not just a single celebratory stunt but an ongoing international treasure
hunt in embryo:
Now that SA
[selective availability] is off, we can start a worldwide Stash
Game! With non-SA accuracy, it should be easy to find a stash from waypoint
information. Waypoints of secret stashes could be shared on the Internet, people
could navigate to the stashes and get some stuff.
Make your own stash in a unique location, put in some stuff and a logbook,
and post the location on the Internet. Soon we will have thousands of stashes all
over the world to go searching for. Have fun!
The next day, a Vancouver, Washington, GPS buff named Mike Teague drove across the
Columbia River and found Ulmer's stash. He signed his name and left some cigarettes, a
cassette tape, and a pen. That weekend, like a carrier of a virus, Teague created two new
stashesofhisown,ontheslopesofMountSaintHelens.Withinjusttwoweeks,therewere
stashes hidden in a half dozen states, as well as Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, and
Teague put up a simple website to keep track of the growing list of stash coordinates. It
was becoming clear that Ulmer had tapped into something primal—not just the boredom
