OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 134

ofgadgetgurusbutsomeneglectedpartofourhunter-gathererhindbrainthat needs tolook
for elusive things and rarely gets the chance in a modern world where everything we really
need (food, water, heat, reality shows) gets served up to us instantly while we sit by pass-
ively. *
UpthefreewaythreehoursinSeattle,anewlywedcomputerprogrammernamedJeremy
Irish returned home from his honeymoon to find that SaviShopper.com , the retail dot-com
he worked for, was failing. “It was kind of depressing,” he tells me. “I was looking for
distractions.” His wife had given him permission to buy a GPS device, and when he typed
“gps games” into Yahoo!, the first site that came up was Teague's “stash hunt” list. There
was one just fifty miles from his home, he saw, and an hour later, he was bouncing along
a boulder-strewn logging trail in his less-than-rugged Saturn SL2. At the end of the trail,
he continued on foot through a sunbaked clear-cut, on the hottest day of the summer. “I
had very limited water with me,” he says. “It was horrible. A horrible trip.” But the thrill
of finding the stash—an index-card box hidden behind a stump—made the whole ordeal
worth it. “Walking down the hill, I thought, well, the first thing I need to do is prepare
people, so they're not as inexperienced and unprepared as I was.”
Ulmer and the other early GPS scavenger hunters had already decided that “geocache”
was a better name for their treasures than “GPS stash”—drug mules and potheads have
stashes,butold-timeyexplorersandFrench-Canadiantrappershavecaches!—andIrishde-
cidedtobeginasuccessortoTeague'ssiteunderthename“ Geocaching.com ,”whichcame
online with just seventy-five caches listed. A New York Times article outed geocaching to
the general public in October, and the Web server in Irish's guest bedroom could barely
keep up with demand. Maybe, he thought, Geocaching.com could become a real company.
Togetherwithtwoothercastaways ofthee-commerce collapse, hebeganraisingmoney,
but found that venture capital options in those post-Internet-bubble days were few and far
between. “Can you imagine going into a VC and saying 'Hey, we've got this idea—we're
going to create a listing service for plastic containers in the woods'? 'How are you going
to monetize that?' 'I don't know! You never asked that back in 1998!'” Instead, their first
source of funding was a gross of donated T-shirts that they slapped with geocaching lo-
gosandsoldviathewebsite. Thefollowing spring,theystarted selling “premium member-
ships”to Geocaching.com aswell,sotheycouldquittheirdayjobsandworkonimproving
thesitefull-time.Thatdecisionturned Geocaching.com intoarobust,user-friendlysite,the
firstplaceacuriousconsumerwouldgoaftergettingaGPSreceiverasaChristmaspresent,
and it made geocaching into a mass-culture phenomenon. There were only three hundred
caches listed when 2001 began; by the end of 2002, there were more than ten thousand.
That transition didn't come without growing pains, though. The early geocaching com-
munity was an outsider one, an odd mix of techie hackers and tie-dyed outdoorsmen, * and
many were skeptical about an Internet company—from Seattle, no less, just like big bad