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This site is dedicated to South Carolina outdoor enthusiasts who are part of a world-wide hobby where participants place and try to find game pieces left by other enthusiasts using the Global Postioning System (GPS). This hobby is called GPS Stash Hunting or Geocaching. In its most basic form it involves a GPS user hiding a "treasure" somewhere in the wild and posting the exact coordinates on the internet for others to find. This "treasure" is a container that holds a logbook for visitors to log their visits and many times trinkets for visitors to trade. The basic rules of the game are write about your adventure in the logbook and if you take something, leave something in its place. There are well over 100,000 game pieces to find and it is played in over 200 countries. It started as a celebration of the Clinton Administration's removing the induced error from the GPS stream effective May 1, 2000, thus increasing the accuracy of civilian grade GPS units significantly. On May 3, Dave Ulmer placed the very first geocache outside Portland, Oregon and it was found by Mike Teague shortly after that. With in month many more had been hidden, one even as far away as Australia. (More comprehensive history.) It is played by folks from all walks of life, not just outdoorsmen but doctors, lawyers, and celebrities. Some police departments and rescue personel use geocaching as a training tool. There are different levels of play ranging from the easy where a stay-at-home mom or dad can find pieces with their toddlers to the very difficult that may require Sherlockian intellect or a trip to Tibet! There are different variations of the hobby with off-shoot games, as well. There is also a much older hobby (over 150 years old) that is very similar called Letterboxing where folks hide a container, a logbook, and rubber stamp. Visitors stamp the stamp in their personal journal and stamp their personal stamp in the boxes logbook. To find the letterbox, the hunter uses clues much like that from Edgar Allen Poe's The Gold Bug or a pirate's treasure map, though many times it is simple verbal directions on how to find it. To find many of the caches near you, go to geocaching.com and in the upper right-hand corner put your zipcode in the marked box and click "Submit." |