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Up the freeway three hours in Seattle, a newlywed computer programmer named Jeremy 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, but old-timey explorers and French-Canadian trappers have caches!—and Irish decided to begin a successor to Teague’s site under the name “Geocaching.com,” which came 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.

Together with two other castaways of the e-commerce collapse, he began raising money, 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 logos and sold via the website. The following spring, they started selling “premium memberships” to Geocaching.com as well, so they could quit their day jobs and work on improving the site full-time. That decision turned Geocaching.com into a robust, user-friendly site, the first place a curious consumer would go after getting a GPS receiver as a Christmas present, 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 community 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 Microsoft!—swooping in to systematize and commercialize their guerrilla pastime. “Some felt uncomfortable with a small group of people making money off of all their work,” says Ed Hall, who ran another website called Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint, the first to display geocache locations on maps. “What are they bringing to it? Why are they trying to assert ownership over our game?” Irish and his partners made missteps as well, sending legal warnings to Hall’s site (for mining Geocaching.com data to draw his maps) and Quinn Stone’s NaviCache site (because his logo used the word “geocaching,” which Irish had attempted to trademark). After Dave Ulmer himself got into a dust-up on Irish’s message boards, his name was removed from the site’s “History of Geocaching” page, which for a time credited the placing of the first cache to an anonymous “someone.”

The old scuffles are water under the bridge these days. Jeremy Irish is now more savvy about the court of public opinion, and the old guard has come around to the idea of a more centralized, newbie-friendly