Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [90]
In Portland, Oregon, that night, a computer consultant named Dave Ulmer stayed up to watch the change on his GPS receiver, a clunky Magellan 2000 that he’d bought back in the mid-1990s, when the year “2000” appended to a product name still sounded sleek and futuristic. “It was really quite a momentous thing to see happening,” he says. “I still have the track logs that I recorded during that event.” One minute he had a three-hundred-foot radius 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 snowmobiling to the peak of Mount Saint Helens, trying to follow a trail he’d taken once before. 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 eyeglasses 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 technology 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 book, mapping software, the handle of a slingshot, and a can of beans.* Then he posted the latitude and longitude of that spot on an Internet newsgroup for GPS users. That first announcement was startlingly prophetic, envisioning 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 stashes of his own, on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens. Within just two weeks, there were 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 of gadget gurus but some neglected part of our hunter-gatherer hindbrain that needs to look for elusive things and rarely gets the chance in a modern world where everything we really need (food, water, heat, reality