Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [92]
One million geocaches! To be more precise: 1,385,781 active caches at the moment I write this, with more than a thousand new ones appearing each day. That is an astounding number. By comparison, here is a partial inventory of other things there are in the world: 6,230 wide-body jets; 32,000 McDonald’s restaurants; 663,000 zebras; 40,000 Segways; and 15,900 synagogues. You’ve seen all those things, but despite their comparative ubiquity, most people have never knowingly seen a geocache; Groundspeak cofounder Bryan Roth recently called geocaching “the biggest hobby in the world that nobody knows about.” That’s the whole point of the game: the caches are hard to find if you’re not expressly looking for them and sometimes even if you are. But they are everywhere, on all seven continents. There’s a geocache hidden in a stone wall at the Vatican, and one in a high temple niche at Angkor Wat, and another in the crook of a tree by Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Run your hands along the bottom of the front gates at Las Vegas’s Bellagio casino, and you’ll find one magnetically attached. There are six on the slopes of Colorado’s Pikes Peak and two at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station.
Geocaches have changed a little since Dave Ulmer’s day. In fact, his historic first cache would be quickly rejected today by the network of Geocaching.com volunteers that vets all new caches, since it breaks several of their cardinal rules: no buried caches, no food, no money. But the essentials of the game are still exactly what he proposed in his 2001 Usenet post. A container is hidden somewhere in the world—the container might be big or small, elaborately camouflaged or just a simple piece of Tupperware. In addition to a paper log, the cache may contain “swag”—cheap trinkets that finders can swap. The latitude and longitude of the hide are posted on the Web, and anyone with a GPS receiver is free to find it and sign the log with their name (or, more often, their geocaching “handle”). Most will return to Geocaching.com and post a log there as well, describing their experience.
Never having found a geocache myself, I’m a little skeptical—can something that sounds so much like a Boy Scout merit badge actually be any fun? The only GPS device in the Jennings home is “Daniel,” the low-end Garmin navigator suction-cupped to the windshield of our car. Daniel is actually the name of the English-accented voice we’ve selected the device to speak in; the factory default was “Jill,” a high-maintenance-American voice that we can’t stand. When you make a wrong turn, Jill’s error message of “Recalculating!” is an aggrieved sigh. Daniel’s “Recalculating,” by contrast, is in the calm, silky tones of an old family chauffeur. He never judges you. (Actually, our Daniel hasn’t said “Recalculating” since I figured out how to hack into his text files. He now says, “You turned the wrong way, dumb-ass. Just do what I say,” which is a source of endless delight to the backseat.) The kids treat Daniel like a member of the family. A few months ago, as we were walking through a science museum exhibit about GPS, Dylan said wistfully, “I wish Daniel was here. He’d love this.”
We don’t have a handheld GPS, but I remember what Jeremy Irish told me when I visited his office at Groundspeak: “Geocaching is a trick to get kids to go outside. That was our original mantra.” I’d love to see Dylan out exploring the woods behind our house, following ants and building forts and damming streams on a sunny afternoon, but despite our