Stuff You Should Know - What is geocaching?

Episode Date: September 8, 2009

Armed with only a GPS and a sense of adventure, geocachers use their wits to locate containers across the world. Join Chuck and Josh as they explore the history, practice and strange origin of geocaching in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Especially if you're selling something. Squarespace is everything to sell anything. They have the tools you need to get your business off the ground, including e-commerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. Whatever you sell, Squarespace has merchandising features to make your products look their best online. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash S-Y-S-K for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code S-Y-S-K to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. How you doing? Put some fruit juice in there.

Chuck, you were smelling your hand a little bit ago. What's wrong with you? I was just smelling like my wife's handmade artisan soap. Yes, she's having a grand opening. LoveYourMama.com is now going to have a brick-and-mortar store, right? Very proud of her. You and Jerry are coming to the grand opening tomorrow. I have two minutes. I'm looking forward to the Rosemary Garlic Chicken Wings. Chef Charles is going to be making this. They are delicious. I'll report back to all of you S-Y-S-K listeners on just whether or not they are delicious. I wouldn't take Chuck's word for it. Chuck, you know what we're talking about today? Yes.

Actually, let me throw this out. This is totally unrelated. It's just too interesting to not mention. I was talking to Ben Bolin, evil, mad creator of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. Soon to be released, hopefully. Hopefully, yeah. He was telling me, he just found out that the average house price in Detroit right now, $11,500. Really? Yeah. And you just, this has nothing to do with what we're doing. No, but can you, that boggles the mind. Yeah, that's really cheap. So anyway, after this, we're moving to Detroit. Okay. Instead of Detroit housing prices, we are actually talking about geocaching, right?

Yes, and I want to go ahead and say that this has been oft-requested by many, many people, geocachers, I guess. And I just want to apologize and say I didn't save all your names, especially the dude last week. I had a guy that we emailed back and forth like three or four times in a few hours. And he was actually geocaching while he was writing me and listening to our podcast on his iPhone while he was geocaching. That kind of gets things done. So he, I kind of feel whenever someone says they listened to us in India when they went on their trip or when they did this, I always feel like we're kind of brought along and I always thank people for bringing us along. Sure, yeah. Instead, we're actually stuck here in the studio. Apparently, we also cure homesickness. We've gotten several emails. From Atlantis?

Yes, and I've heard firsthand stories about people who were sitting in airports in India who was just totally homesick and listened to our podcast and was cured. That's nice. Or comforted at least. All right, geocaching. Yeah? Yeah. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Just a little background info, Chuck.

Okay. Actually, geocaching can be traced directly back to Korean Airlines Flight 007. Really? In 1983, this commercial airline or this commercial plane was flying, I guess, in Asia and draped into, inadvertently, draped into Soviet airspace and was shot down by the Soviets. Yeah, I remember that. So as a result, President Reagan said, okay, we've got this kind of GPS system that the Air Force has been using for a while, but we need to make this commercially available so that this doesn't happen again. Really? So they did.

Reagan started that whole thing. Reagan did. Well, it was already in effect, but he made sure that this program really went to town. Right. So they started launching more and more satellites for global positioning systems. Right. Right. And they, eventually, it became available to the public.

Right. To airlines, to whoever wanted it. Sure. But there was a little glitch, a purposeful glitch in the system. I did not know about this until I read up on this. Right. So that's kind of a surprise. Selective availability.

Yeah, basically, they intentionally made the GPS systems available to the public off base by a little bit. By about 300 feet. 300 feet, because they wanted the military, the U.S. military, to have the most advanced system to pinpoint a location. And they wanted to get, you know, your average Joe just in the general area. Right. And so if you're a Korean pilot, you give yourself a 300 foot buffer when you're flying along, you know, Soviet airspace. Easy enough.

Right. But if you, you know, are the manufacturer of an onboard GPS system for a car, you don't want your customers going, you know, Tom Tom, you're a stupid like every time you ask a for directions. Right. So there was a certain limitation by that 300 feet because, you know, turn right 300 feet ago. Right. It's not, not very helpful. But President Clinton comes along and sees the value of GPS.

I like this stuff. Yeah. That's exactly what he said. And he liked it enough so that he issued an executive order saying, we need to get selective availability offline within 10 years. That was 1996. Right. It was supposed to be 206, but lucky for us to happen six years sooner.

Right. So now everybody thinks Tom Tom's as smart as he can be. And this hobby comes about almost immediately. Because you could pinpoint location. Strickland says he wrote this article between six and 20 feet. Not bad. Right. So, so this whole wealth of handheld GPS devices hit the market.

Right. And right off the bat, a guy named Dave Olmer decides to test how well his works. I don't know what model he had. Yeah. By hiding an item and going and marking its location and then leaving and coming back and see if it could redirect him back there. Right. And so he left a little, little box and went on a website of his and said, here is a book.

Here's the box. Here's the coordinates. And I think he wrote very famously, take some stuff. He put a couple of trinkets in there. That's really what started the whole thing. And not only did it start it, it's pretty much the same way nine years later. Like this initial geocache hunt that he created, it immediately created the model that people follow today.

Well, it's a good model. If it ain't broke, you know, it's a pretty basic simple thing. It's fun. I just realized we haven't actually said what geocaching is. Right. Yeah. We should probably get to that. So you use your GPS to, it's basically like a, a treasure hunt.

People will leave these caches, you know, hidden in a location and you, and with the coordinates and you get from a website, let's say, and then you go and try and find it and they have little trinkets in there. You can take, then you leave your own little trinket and it's just like a big treasure hunt that anyone can participate in. Sure. Anybody who has access to the internet. Sure.

And GPS receiver and very, very important, a topographical map. Yeah. That would help. And actually also strict, I have to say Jonathan Strickland, who is one of our colleagues and co-hosts of tech stuff. Who you know from Necronomicon. Yeah. Yeah.

That came out, didn't it? He makes an excellent point. You want to make sure that the map that you are using was made after 1984. And the reason being is in that year, we switched over the type of data that's used to create maps or to position people. So the World Geodetic System of 1984 was the new convention for creating positioning, creating maps that's used for GPS, all that stuff. It took, it replaced the North American datum system.

Of 1927. Yes. So if you have a map that was made between 1927 and what, 1983, your topographical, exactly the year before, man that was a monumental year. It was. And your map and your GPS receiver aren't going to match and you can run into some problems. Because your GPS receiver might just say you're getting warmer, go in this direction, it may have a compass.

If you don't have one that you can upload maps onto, then you're not going to know that you're about to fall off a cliff or something because you're staring at your receiver, right? So your little topo map and your compass will let you know, hey, there's a river crossing or like you said, cliff ahead, danger. So Dave Omer hid the first GEO cache and a guy named Mike Teague was the first to find it. Actually, surprisingly, it's almost like this hobby, this pastime or, I don't know what you refer to it as.

It's a game. A sport. Sure. I don't know about sport. Well, there's hiking involved a lot of times. I don't know about sport. But so Omer hides this and within, I think, three days, two people found it. And yet two people independently of each other.

All right. So it was simmering right on the surface. A GEO cache was just waiting to happen. There was a market for it. All right. So they called it GPS stash hunt at the beginning now, which is a little clumsy compared to GEO caching. Yeah.

And everyone else, well, not everyone, but someone at some point suggested, who's it? Matt Stom? Yeah. He was the one who came up with the, sure, coining the phrase or the term. It's catchy. It's catchy. It's catchy. It's catchy.

So you've got your GPS receiver. You've got your topographical map. Check. I assume you're probably wearing woolly socks. What else do you need? Well, they advise to take things like flashlight and bug spray, sunblock, hiking boots, water, that kind of thing, extra batteries. We should say all this is to assume that you actually want to go on a GEO cache hunt.

Sure. Right. And you're not just sitting around your house listening to it. We should also say there's several websites dedicated to this hobby, and that's where you want to go to start finding out locations for a cache, right? There'll be links or else there'll be a list of different caches, their coordinates. Geocaching.com is the main one, I think. Yeah.

And you want to, unless you're just really adventurous, you probably want to pick something sort of close to you on your first try, at least, to kind of break your caching hobby in. Right. And some people hide their caches as Strickland put it with sadistic glee. Yeah. That seems to be, that seems to be part of it is, because it's no fun if it's just sitting right there in the middle of the trailhead.

Well, not only that, it's probably some schmo who doesn't know what's going on. Sure. It'll be like, oh, look, something, I don't know what this is. Right. Well, that leads us to an important point. If you are stashing a cache, a cache, why'd I have such a problem with that? My wife's going to make fun of me. That's the least of your problems, Joe.

Emily's going to make fun of me because I do mess up that word a lot. She thinks I'm an idiot. So like if your average hiker happens upon this box full of Santana CDs, and they're thinking, wow, I can just take these CDs and one lift these. This is awesome. Yeah. Or drugs. No, no.

No, no. That's one of the things that you are not supposed to put in these caches because it's a family friendly activity and they don't want to sully it with the likes of illegal drugs and such. Sure. What about alcohol? Keep it clean. Yeah. Okay.

So Santana CDs is pretty much what you're going to find in a geocache. Well, he did say CDs and DVDs or handmade trinkets. You don't want it to be too expensive because you don't want to sink a lot of money into it. But if you take something, you should leave something. You don't have to take something. But I think you said if you don't take anything or leave anything, you should write in the logbook that's contained inside the cache.

TNLN. Yeah. Took nothing or left nothing, took nothing. Right. So one thing that you're going to find in any geocache, and Chuck, you were saying like you should put an explanation and maybe a note, Strickland also recommended actually labeling it. Right.

Like this is a geocache. Here's my email or here's my phone number because I don't know if you said it or not. You don't want to cause a panic. Well, now I didn't mention that. Some people geocache in cities and actually in New Hampshire, I can't remember what town it was, a geocache that was hidden in a supermarket caused a panic. Yeah, Portsmouth. You know, post 9-11, people see little metal boxes someplace it shouldn't be.

They're going to be like, well, there's a bomb. Yeah. Stuck to the underside of like an escalator rail. I'm sure, yeah. Exactly. Especially if it blinks or something like that. And some nerd is like, what a great hiding spot. Meet me.

And then all of a sudden the cops are, you know, tackling them. Yeah. Chuck, as I was saying, though, one thing that you're going to find in any geocache is a logbook. Very important. Yeah. Because you want to, it's sort of like a wedding thing that you sign when you go to a wedding. You want to say that you were here.

Any kind of guest book. Wedding, funeral, bed and breakfast. Yeah. You want to add your notes like what you found or what your experience was. This was cool. Some of them have disposable cameras in them. And what you're supposed to do there is take a picture of yourself and put the camera back in there.

Right. And some people actually like to see if they can get, based on that whole taking something and leaving something, they like to see if they can get their trinkets across country. Yes, Josh. That is, what's that called? A hitchhiker cache. Right. And if their instructions on how to get this thing across country, the geocaches take

great pride in playing along and trying to get the St. Tana CD from Atlanta to Los Angeles, let's say. And some people also have coins made with some sort of ID on it. They're called geocoins. It's a type of hitchhiker cache. And it's basically you find the coin, you put it somewhere else and you're leaving, you're posting these on site so somebody can go on and see that their coins made it from Topeka to Colorado Springs so far and they're like, oh, it's getting close.

Right. Yeah. I think I'd love the spirit of this whole thing. I think it's really neat. I'm going to try this actually. I've never done it. St. Tana heavy drug-free traveling spirit of geocaching captures your imagination, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. We should also say that if you're going to plant and start your own little geocache game that you want to stay away from private land, first of all. Yeah, there's actually, some public officials are aware of geocaching and not everybody's hip with it, technically the entire state of New Hampshire is one example. Well they're threatening to outlaw it, correct? Yeah. And I know National Parks is not allowed.

Some state parks it is allowed, but they say the whole spirit of this thing is to be respectful of the environment, not cause a mess, not damage anything and it's really important to geocachers to that they're looked at in a favorable light. Yeah. They're looked at as cooperative and helpful. So basically if you're hiding a geocache, you want to kind of pull your head out of the game and actually really kind of look around. Not just look for a hiding place, but look at the impact that geocachers who come to

look for your cache are going to have on this area. So you don't want to put it in a place that's a good one. Historic and archeological sites, you don't want to place those there. It's basically anywhere where a lot of people tramping, I guess it's probably smart to assume that there's going to be a lot of hunters looking for it, that they're not going to really have a terrible impact on this area. Right. I would put one in a tree stand, a deer hunting tree stand and see what that did for you.

Yeah. In the middle of deer season. Sure. Smart. Not a good idea. So Chuck, is it true or not that you will be murdered if you remove a cache? Not true, but not cool. What about a spanking?

You might get spanked. Yeah. The initial guy who started it, he might track you down and geospank you. But conversely also, you want to maintain your cache, right? Like if you get a couple of logs of people saying, I couldn't find this thing no matter what. That's a bad sign. Yeah.

It means you should go out and look at your cache. Yeah. You want to be clever about where you hide it, not too clever, or somebody may have walked off with it. You want to also keep an eye on your log book because if that gets filled up, you want to replace it with another one. You want to bag it. You want to bag everything in a zip lock so it doesn't get rained on.

You want to double bag the log book. Absolutely. Leave a fact. Leave a pen and a pencil just in case these guys and gals don't bring theirs along because the log book is the most important part. Actually the second, well, I'd say it's a tie. The other most important part is that you log the stuff on the website as well when you get home.

Right. So everyone else knows what's going on. Yeah. And the game continues. It does. And this podcast continues, Chuck, because there's actually variations on geocaching. This I thought was really cool. There's the straight up geocache, which we've been talking about.

There's also multi-caches, which are basically there's a series of caches which are related to one another. So you go to one cache and instead of Santana CDs or Dare to Keep Kids Off Drug Stickers, there are coordinates to another one and you just go and go and go. That's like a real treasure hunt. Yes, it is. Minus the treasure, of course. Yeah.

Well, it depends on how many Santana CDs you can pull. Plus they say the treasure is in the experience itself. It's not so much about the trinkets. Like I said, in the spirit of goodness and giving, I see that you're put out by that. You want some money or something. There's also the letterbox hybrid. Yeah, explain that. So that's kind of like a combination between straight up geocaching and a type of treasure

hunting, which is letterboxing. So it's like a multi-cache. But you have to solve puzzles or figure out hints or clues to the location along with these coordinates. Yeah, which sounds like fun. And the coordinate may be a starting point, or is that a mystery cache that I'm thinking of? Yes, that is a mystery cache.

I see. That's not mistaken. Well, it was pretty close to the letterbox hybrid, frankly. And then there's a virtual cache, which I think kind of stinks, because there's no loot involved. That's just the location that exists. I thought you were in it for the spirit of cashing. Well, for the spirit of that, and okoyoma, that free Santana CD, I know what I'm getting

you for Christmas. Santana CD? Yeah. Sweet. And Josh, you mentioned hints for the puzzle. That's not limited to just the letterbox or the mystery cache. It's a lot of times you'll want to include little hints on your website to get people there.

It's like not only coordinates. Yeah. So Chuck, if somebody wants to go ahead and get into this, where do you start? Well, I guess you would want to pick out a location, a general location. And like we said, since you have to manage your little stash here, then you want to have it kind of close by, so it's manageable and easy to get to. You don't want to have to manage something that you have to scale like a 50-foot wall to get to, unless you're that dude, then knock yourself out.

That's right, Chuck. But also, you want to start by buying the GPS receiver, right? That's a good place to start. And you don't want to just say, hey, I bought my GPS receiver, I'm going to start geocaching. You want to test it out a little bit first, and how do you do that, big boy? Well, I guess you would go to a spot, ping where you are. Right. You want to call it pinging or what?

We're going to call it ping. Ping where you are, and then leave, and then see if you can get back there using the GPS, right? Yeah. That's pretty easy. I'd probably do it more than once, too, with a couple different locations. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah.

But once you get started, then you can start a few hunts, maybe hide your own, meet some cool people, spend a bunch of money on disposable cameras. St. Anthony's? Yeah. It's wide open. I guess we need to cover the lingo real quick, too. All right. So if you're out there and you see these letters, like if you're a texter, you don't

know what lol means, you'd be mighty confused if everyone keeps saying lol to you. So C-I-T-O means cash in, trash out, and that's one of the tenets is that you should kind of like hikers, take only pictures, leave only footprints, mantra, so you should like pick up trash along the way and take it with you. Got you. That's one. You want to name another one? Or you want me to do all these?

Well, I already talked about TNLN. Okay. It took nothing, even nothing. There's FTF, which is a big one that's first defined, and if you're the first one to define the stash, that's pretty cool. I can tell you a name for us, GeoMuggles, just people who don't geocache. So I'd say like 99.9999999997% of the global population are GeoMuggles. GeoMuggles.

Yeah. That's true, and a spoiler, just like you would suppose, is a comment that reveals the location on like a website or something, and he would want to do that. A GeoMuggle would do that. Like any good underground hobby, it has its lingo, it has its websites, but like you were saying, it's family-friendly, and there's just kind of a cool spirit to it, and it struck me as very open. Yeah.

And geocaching is one of the more friendly hobbies around. Yeah. Anytime you start a community like this, like the hash runs that people do, it's cool, you know? It's something that people can take part in, and it's a lot of fun. Gotcha. I guess we can we mention Philadelphia real quick? Sure.

They actually have embraced it big time. In the spring of 2007, they had a little thing where they wanted to promote a little promotional deal. It was a Franklin Institute's King Tut display, and they actually had a geocaching game that they presented to the public, where you'll go to 12 different sites related to the exhibit, and each site had a stamp, and you collected these stamps, and once you've collected all of them, then you get a prize at the end, which, from what I understand, was a Santana CD.

Yeah. And a ticket to the King Tut exhibit. Nice. So, Chuck. Is that it? That is it. If you want to know more about geocaching, I got to tell you, Strickland wrote the definitive article on this.

He used the geek god tone, where it was like, no drugs, you know, I mean, he just, he did it. He knocked it out of the park. He did. So, if you want to learn more about geocaching, I would strongly urge you to, even before you go buy your GPS receiver, read Jonathan Strickland's article on geocaching. That's a good start. There's also Marshall Brain, founder of the site, and Tom Harris, one of our freelance

writers, wrote how GPS works. Really good overview of how global positioning works. Those are two good articles. You can find them both by typing in GPS into the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. And Chuck, before we do listener mail, let's plug. What are we plugging? Let's plug the webcast and the blogs. Okay.

Today afternoon, 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Josh and I do a little webcast. Live. It's a live video. Video webcast. Just so there's no mistaking it. And it's more newsy, and we cover current events and interesting topics from around the world. And it's fun.

We've been getting some. It is fun. It's got to be fun. I stop feeling the urge to vomit right before it every time. You're solid, bro. It's good. So are you, buddy. Thanks.

And then we also have a blog, Stuff You Should Know blog, very much in the spirit of Stuff You Should Know. We pretty much write about whatever strikes our fancy. Which is nice. Yeah. You wrote about a gun-toting town hall meeting attendee recently. Yeah. And some good debate on that one, which I figured.

Yeah. It's nice. I wrote about Gary Warren, the founder of the Suicide Club. So those are just a couple of examples. That was a good one. Thanks, bud. Yeah. So that's Plugfest 09, which means it's time for a listener mail.

Yes. Before we, again, do listener mail, our producer Jerry had a special request, because we referred to the great Ira Glass as our archonymesis in a few podcasts ago, which we got in some response. People were like, what's going on, guys? We love Ira Glass. We figured y'all would be fans, too. We do love Ira Glass.

Oh, we're big-time fans. And we love this American life. And there's a friendly ratings war that they consistently win. And so that's why we called them our archonymesis. But there's nothing but love. Sure. So Ira Glass, if you know we exist, we love you. Thank you for inspiring us.

Yes? So what else you got, Josh? I got listener mail. OK. All right, Josh, listener mail time. We have a couple of quickies here. I'm going to call this one Sarkopinia Proven. So we had a guy right in, said he's been listening for a while now, and he wants to say that

we're great. He is a gym dude, and he was listening to the podcast at the gym, and it struck a chord with me. About six months ago, a little fragile, hunched over lady started showing up at the gym. I probably would not have taken much notice, but she was toting around a portable oxygen tank, which gave me a deep respect for her tenacity, and a water bottle with a very large straw protruding from it. She shows up on a regular basis and puts everyone else to shame and works hard with

the trainer, since that time, she has become the poster child for reversing the aging process. Sweet. First, she dropped the oxygen tank, completely gone, then she lost her hunch in her back, and is walking upright again. That's awesome. She still has a water bottle with the straw, which has become the only way for me to identify her because she looks so much younger. Thanks for helping me understand exactly how this went down, and that is from Jason.

Booyah. Pretty cool. Yeah. This is from our buddy, Danielle, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It's Canton. Danielle and I are pen pals, and she loves that we mention Eau Claire and Sheboygan in places like that. She sent us a list of other Wisconsin cities that she bets we cannot pronounce.

All right. I'm just going to put that here. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and say the first one is Okanama Kawawakawak. I think you're way off. All right. You go next. Wawatosa.

That was pretty easy. The next one is Alta Gemayi. You sound Cambodian. I'm going to try Trimpolo. Trimpolo. I get these ones. All right. The next one is...

No, it's not easy. Kewani. Kewanii. Yeah. That's not easy at all. All right. Waukesha. And finally, we have Waiowega.

Yeah. And then the last one is Double Dash Danielle. Yeah. Danielle. It's a weird city name. Yeah. So, Danielle. Take that.

Yeah. Perfect pronunciation. All the way down the list. Yeah. In your face, Danielle. And sarcopania. If you want to correspond with Chuck or I, Chuck's actually really good at responding to listener mail.

And he's made some pretty good friends along the way. So if you want to be Chuck's friend, send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

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