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checkered relationship. The creepy lurking isn’t the most serious problem; since 9/11, hiding weird-looking packages in public urban places has become an increasingly bad idea, and hardly a month goes by without news reports of a geocache-sparked mass evacuation, which typically ends in a bomb squad dutifully detonating a small box of gumball-machine toys. Often these hides have been placed, in violation of Geocaching.com guidelines, too close to infrastructure: bridges, railroads, or monuments. And it doesn’t help that one of the most common kind of geocache container is the most suspicious-looking one possible: a green military-surplus ammunition can. You might as well hide your logbook in a round black ticking sphere with a sizzling fuse on top and the word “BOMB” written on the side. In Arabic. “I use Tupperware now, because it doesn’t look dangerous,” says Ed Hall. “An ammo box: not so much.”

Cache containers in the wilderness can cause problems of another kind: once you attract hundreds of people to some out-of-the-way spot, it’s not an out-of-the-way spot anymore. Visible “geotrails” tend to form as vegetation gets trampled and soil compacted.* The National Park Service banned geocaching from national parks and wilderness areas early on, seeing it as a perversely elaborate form of littering. But in a time of declining park attendance, many wilderness managers are privately sympathetic to geocachers, who are model visitors in other respects: avid, knowledgeable nature lovers who often organize cleanup events as they search, using the motto “CITO”—“cache in, trash out.” In October 2009, the park service “clarified” its policy by giving park superintendents leeway to allow geocaching where appropriate, and in 2010, caches finally returned to some national parklands.

Just three months after finding my first cache, I’m officially addicted. I don’t go out on twenty-four-hour power-caching runs like the ventura_kids, but I do get a little twitchy if I haven’t grabbed a cache for a day or so. I try to pretend that my habit is “just research,” or I drag Dylan along with me as a sort of beard, so that I can blame it all on his insatiable appetite for plastic toys, but he typically gets bored at least an hour or two before I do and I have to string him along with the promise of doughnuts so that he’ll come with me for just one more, I swear. I schedule errands around the locations of puzzle caches I’ve solved. I switch out my Swiss Army knife for one that has tweezers (for removing stubborn log papers from tiny cache containers) and a ballpoint pen for signing. In fact, I’ve signed my caching handle in so many logbooks that I actually catch myself endorsing a check with it once.

It’s not unusual for geocachers to rearrange their lives around the game. “Viajero Perdido,” an Alberta geocacher, became so obsessed with a single cache on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, one that had sat in the jungle for five years without a single find, that he flew all the way to Central America just to log it and tacked on a Caribbean vacation so that friends and family wouldn’t think he was crazy. (He and his native guides spent hours blazing trails with machetes, but with no luck; he returned home with nothing but a “DNF”—“Did Not Find”—to his credit.) “Hukilaulau,” from Long Island, says he took a temp job in Phoenix just so he could stop in Kansas along the way to log “Mingo,” the world’s oldest active cache.

Dave Ulmer claims that geocaching’s addictive properties were all part of his master plan. “Geocaching is a new application program for your brain,” he tells me. “It’s like getting a new game for your computer and installing it. When you learn about geocaching, you’re installing a new game in your brain.” Ulmer has spent the last decade working on Beyond the Information Age, a manifesto on information theory that he’s convinced will change human history, if he could only get someone to read it. From my perusal of the manuscript, I become convinced that it’s either completely crackpot or completely genius; I’m just not smart enough to tell