Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
quito Coast, one that had sat in the jungle for five years without a single find, that he
flew all the way to Central America just to log it and tacked on a Caribbean vacation
so that friends and family wouldn't think he was crazy. (He and his native guides spent
hours blazing trails with machetes, but with no luck; he returned home with nothing but
a “DNF”—“Did Not Find”—to his credit.) “
Hukilaulau
,” from Long Island, says he took
a temp job in Phoenix just so he could stop in Kansas along the way to log “Mingo,” the
world's oldest active cache.
Dave Ulmer claims that geocaching's addictive properties were all part of his master
plan. “Geocaching is a new application program for your brain,” he tells me. “It's like get-
ting a new game for your computer and installing it. When you learn about geocaching,
you're installing a new game in your brain.” Ulmer has spent the last decade working on
Beyond the Information Age,
a manifesto on information theory that he's convinced will
change human history, if he could only get someone to read it. From my perusal of the
manuscript, I become convinced that it's either completely crackpot or completely geni-
us; I'm just not smart enough to tell the difference. In Ulmer's parlance, geocaching is an
“ISSU”—a self-replicating “intelligent system specification unit.” “It's a very complicated
system, when you think of all the millions of people that are involved in it. That's how I
put it together, and that's why it worked so damn well. It was engineered to be that from
day one.”
“So you see the whole activity as a life-form that spreads on its own? Are we all little
neurons in this big brain?”
“That's right!”
But for all my absorption into the geocaching hive-mind, there's one coveted caching
honor I don't have: an FTF, or “First to Find.” Some cachers specialize in finding
virgin
caches—being the first to sign a newly placed hide. If twenty-four-hour power cachers
are the marathoners of the geoworld, then First-to-Find hounds are its sprinters. Bryan
Fix, a Portland, Oregon, native who caches as “Scubasonic,” has a near-superhuman FTF
track record: more than nine hundred FTFs notched, fully 14 percent of his finds. He once
bagged ten in a single day, which is remarkable, since the Portland area sees only ten or
fifteen new caches in a typical
week
.
Back in the day, when there weren't many geocachers, the FTF was an achievement
within the reach of mere mortals; even casual cachers would stumble upon one from time
to time. But this is the steroid era. “Premium” members who pay
Geocaching.com
$30 a
year can choose to receive instant notifications the second a new cache is published, and
the hard-core types make sure those messages find them on their phones or PDAs.
“I actually sleep with my BlackBerry,” Bryan tells me from behind the desk of his Van-
couver, Washington, real estate office. He's a strikingly youthful-looking forty-nine-year-
old, with a high, gleaming forehead that somehow makes him seem boyish, not balding.
“I have it on the vibrate mode, and if it beeps, I jump up and I'm gone. I always have my