Your First Find?

[+Byron & Anne]

The recent changes in gc.com prompted me to ask this question. The first cache you found did you create a free account at gc.com then go find that first cache?

Did you create that "free account" then go find that first cache?

[+Byron & Anne]

Now that I've asked the question, I'll answer my own experience.

I found out about GC.com from a news or magazine blurb. Went to the site and thought this sounds like fun. Picked a few caches and printed the cache pages.

 

Off we went in search, we already owned a gps. First attempt, no find, made too many wrong turns driving. Second attempt, ran out of day light. Both of those were Dave Ulmer caches. Third times the charm, off we went searching for the Un-Orginal, found it. Wow, what a high.

 

Came back home, created the account and gleefully entered the found log.

 

I don't think I would have gone after any if had been required to get an account before hunting that first cache.

 

Byron

[+SeventhSon]

I created the account, then found the cache, then sent money.

[+Team Neos]

Created the account, then went out and found three of the four caches we looked for that first day. I don't have any real problems with creating free accounts, and belong to several for genealogy purposes, several more for teaching reasons, and even more for some of my hobbies.

[+Renegade Knight]

I went to look and my first cache was adopted and that owner made it MO I can't figure out how to find my first DNF date. If I recall though my first cache was after I signed up.

[+Airmapper]

Account first, then cache. Almost went the other way to make sure there was actually going to be something there, but I got hooked at looking at the site and went ahead and made an account so I could see more.

[+SeventhSon]

RK, go to your Account Details page, click on "show all logs for caches" and it should be at the very bottom.

[+Jester2112]

I stumbled across the site while looking up Florida treasure hunting and the underwater metal detectors, don't ask, it involved a lost piece of jewelry while kayaking. My first thought that night was this is "BS". There can't be a secret society out there hiding stuff only a few blocks from my house that I don't know about and certainly not hundreds of thousands of them all around the world. A buddy came over later that night and I told him about it and we were checking out the site. Found one located at the end of a boardwalk very near my house that I new only had a few places you could hide something as described on the page. We struck out bound and determined to prove this to be just another urban legend type website. Imagine our dissapointment when we actually found the darn thing!!!

 

Came right home with him, we both created accounts, logged our find and went out and found 2 more that night. He was off from work the next day and attempted to find one which was in a large park. After 45 minutes of searching, he got frustrated, headed for Wally World, picked up his first Etrex, found the cache and the rest is history as most addicts say!!!

 

If I had stumbled upon the website and it had required to create a free, and quick to setup, account to search, I still would have. But then again, I've been bitten by things in the woods just for sticking my hand in a hole to see what's in there!!!

[+mb3]

I found my first cache then signed up. I probably would have created a free account first if I needed to.

[+Kit Fox]

My first cache was a fake pile of dog crap! I was instantly hooked on caching !

 

I did not have an account yet, because a good friend had taken me with him. He DNFed three times on this particular cache, and I spotted it on my first trip caching. For about a month, I found caches without a GPS (broke at the time).

 

I signed up and became a premium member before I even owned a GPS.

[+sassydil]

Signed up August 8th before I even got my GPSr. Found my first cache on the 14th and became a Premium Member on the 16th.

[+TheFreshwaterAnglers]

Signed up. Became a Premium Member. Found first cache....maybe I'll buy a GPS after tax time.

 

T.

[+caughtatwork]

Identified the closest caches, went and tried to find three (all failed), worked out how to use the GPSr, tried to find them again, success and then I signed up.

 

Would I have created an account just to see the co-ords. Probably not. I dislike signing up to see what's on the other side of the fence.

[+Teamhawaii1981 & blueicyrose]

Told by Friend. Signed Up. Read Site. Bought GPSr. Found First (Micro) took 3 times in one day. Did 13 more caches over about a month. Became Premium Member.

[Team Firebird]

I got a Gps for christmas and signed up for a free membership two hours later. I found my first cache next week.

[+Sagefox]

I had a Garmin eMap for about 8 months prior. While flying back home from Seattle we read an article in Alaska Airline's seatback magazine about geocaching. We got home and went to the website and found people had already taged our remote coastal location with about 15 caches.

 

The next weekend we dragged our friend Roadcow along and went after three of the nearest caches. The first one required climbing up into an abandoned railroad trestle. Mrs. Sagefox figured out the spot and did the climbing. That pretty much got us permanently attached to geocaching.

 

Signed up that evening to log our finds. Paid for premium membership a few months later when they first introduced that option.

[Trinity's Crew]

We had tried geocaching briefly in 2001 with my wife's brother - (2) DNF (which we didn't log... D'oh!) and one hide that my family and I placed on an island which went missing pretty quickly.

 

 

When I got my own Etrex Legend for Christmas in 2003, I remembered how much fun we had caching. So, in early January 2004, I called up a friend and our families went caching together. I couldn't remember the name or password of the "old" account, so I just printed off a handful that were nearby, and went out the door.

 

We found the first cache we looked for and, while writing in the log, we realized we didn't have a name. We named our group after my friends youngest daughter right on the spot.

 

We found a few that weekend and I created an account to log our adventures online. My brother-in-law eventually remembered the old account information, and Jeremy has since merged the two accounts. (Thanks again!)

 

The new account requirement wouldn't have stopped me from geocaching, it just would have slowed me down by a few minutes.

 

Edit: Spelling

Edited October 20, 2005 by Trinity's Crew

[Newbie2GPS]

Found this place while yahooing looking up information on which GPS to buy and where to buy it. From there I had to find out what the heck this cache thing was. Made an account to ask questions about GPS and did a search for caches near my house. To my surprise there were many in my little town. Did a quick look by my self on the way home from work and found nothing. Then after church last Sunday I stopped with 2 of my boys for another look. My son found it. We were amazed and wish we had more time to invest. They are asking me everyday if we can go hunting for them. Thinking of many ways to hide our own and in what places to hide them. This is something we all can do together and do it just about any place from what I see. So we’ll be getting more and more involved. I’m making up a hunters one that I’ll plant deep in the woods and a fishing one that I’ll put out at some waterway.

 

Jay

[+Rubacava]

I took a trip with my brother, he had a Garmin Ique we used for navigation to route us to Reno, NV. I wanted to buy one so I went to Garmins web site. I saw something about geocaching and thought, What is this? I read about it and checked to see if there were any caches in my little town. I couldn't believe it! So many perhaps 20 with in a few minutes of the house. So, signed up at GC.com, got my GPS a couple weeks later and found my first cache shortly thereafter. It was located in a rural park close by. It was an odd mix of elation and excitement, pretty compelling. So, with that, I was hooked. I became a GC.com member even before I got my GPSr. Having to become a member didn't stop me for one second. I signed up to be premium member a few days later just because I wanted to support the people creating and supporting the site. This weekend I am going hiking to a cache area with 2 people who have never geocached but I have told them about it. They are really excited about the hike and the geocache possibility.

[+briansnat]

I read about geocaching in the local newspaper and thought it sounded like the greatest thing. I registered on the site on 9/14 to poke around and ordered a GPS (eTrex Legend).

 

The day I received it (9/21) I headed over to the nearest cache which was about a mile from my house. That was a lucky stroke as there were barely 50 caches in the entire state at that time. I talked my step daughter into going (she was about 12 at the time) and being a typical male I didn't read the owner's manual.

 

I tried matching up the coords on the GPS's screen with the caches coords. I had no idea that there was even a navigation page. It took us quite a while and a lot of unecessary bushwacking to find the cache, but we eventually did. I took a military patch (42nd Infantry Rainbow Division) and left a penlight and an acorn (that my stepdaughter insisted on putting inside).

[+HaLiJuSaPa]

No our first find (actually 2 finds) was with my brother-in-law who we we visiting in NC so we didn't actually own a GPS (my brother-in-law did of course) nor were aware of gc.com yet. It was after when we went back home to NY that I bought a GPS and created an account, though I did eventually log our 2 finds from that day.

Edited October 20, 2005 by hairymon

[+wandererrob]

I first heard about geocaching through a friend in the New England XTerra club. I had recently bought a GPS for hiking and he suggested another fun use for it.

 

Turns out another fellow club member at the time had one hidden near where I work and was reputed to be the first cache placed in MA (placed back in Oct. 2000 - it's still there under another cacher's care now).

 

So one day I signed up for a free account, did a bit of reading, then after work one fine day off I went after my first geocache.

Edited October 20, 2005 by wandererrob

[+StarBrand]

Read about it on Garmin's web site while upgrading the firmware in my eTrex legend. I was quite skeptical but signed up for an account right away. Was lucky to have one only 1 mile away from me and only 4 within 100 miles. 30 minutes later I was digging through a pile of leaves and pulling out a rusty coffee can. Original placer of that cache found exactly 3 and hid one before dropping out. I am now the proud owner of that same listing. Looks odd to have a placed cache about 2 months before I found one.

[+Mystery Ink]

I heard about Geocaching from my dad he bought a GPS for our boat and wanted to learn it so he searched on the web and discovered this site. He told me about it asked me what would be a good name for it So I suggested Mystery Ink since I was going to school for animation and was always a fan of the ScoobyDoo. While Working on fishing boats as a deckhand and living in oregon at the time. My health got bad and I had a spontanious PhemoThorax in otherwords my lungs colapsed for no reason and was in the hospital. My dad rushed up to oregon right away and stayed with me for 2 weeks after I was released from ICU then he took me on geocaching and my first cache ever was. Tidal Weight (or is that Wait?) Cache which we were only able to get at low tide ever since I was hooked.

Edited October 20, 2005 by Mystery Ink

[+Thrak]

We have an annual block breakfast on my street. When we asked one of my neighbors (bobolu) what he had been up to he got a big grin on his face and said, "Treasure hunting!!!". Of course we asked what that was all about and he started talking about Geocaching. Being a computer nerd who had spent the last 3.5 years online gaming (in my off hours) and on game-related forums (often on my work time) I was intrigued.

 

I needed someting new in my life and this sounded like a way to use the computer but also get outdoors for a change. I went home and looked up the site. I wanted to check out what others had to say so I made an account to get access to these forums. I checked stuff out for a week or so - maybe a little longer - and started researching GPSr units. One day I found a killer deal on eBay and figured I'd toss a bid out there. There was 11 minutes left on the auction and I actually figured I'd be outbid at the last minute. Surprise - nobody bid and I found I had won a brand new, in the box, GPSMAP76CS. I got it delivered to my door for $397.00. When it arrived I immediately headed out and found my first cache - a nice ammo box that had been hidden by the same neighbor who had first mentioned Geocaching to me. OMG - that was awesome and I was instantly hooked.

 

Making an account first was no determent to me. Since I already had over 4,000 posts on those game related boards I was already familiar with the whole forum thing. I'm REALLY glad I went to that block breakfast and heard about this odd hobby called Geocaching. Now when I go out to get my mail I'm sometimes hassled by other neighbors who ask me if I don't need "your gps thingie" to find the mailbox. I just grin and tell them my latest find count - I hit 100 in my first two months of caching.

Edited October 20, 2005 by thrak

[+jacobsen1]

My wife runs marathons... She wants a forerunner 301 for her birthday (Late Nov). So I was on the Garmin Site researching that unit. We also sail a lot in the summer, and I alwasy wanted a mapping GPSr, so when I was done getting all the info on the unit she wants, I gas checking out the 76 series and the Legend series. I though they were too expensive, but once I searched the internet I realized the deals you could get them for. I also got pointed to GC.com from the garmin site, and joined so that I could ask questions on the forum about units. I'm a member of a few other hobby related forums, so joining for the forum was not a big deal, and you always need to join to have access to forums so that was no big deal. I read about the different units on here, and after going to West marine to hold the different sizes, I decided on the GPSMAP76. I got it just in time for our 3 year anniversary. We went out 3 days after our anniversary (it already gets dark here before we are off work) and found our first 3 caches. I had already made the account to gain access to the forum, but I would not have hesitated to join to get the coordinates if I had to. Also I was telling my sister about the whole thing, and she joinded last night, and I belevie that was after the change, so she didn't hesitate either. She's ordering a GPSr this week and is also very excited to get started...

 

CN: I joined to have access to forum, and I would have joined to see the coords if I had to, my sister did join just to see the coords...

 

Ben

 

Oh yeah, The forerunner 301 is in the box at home waiting for her birthday, but we both got the GPSMAP for our anniversary, so I find it funney that the unit that got us into this is still at home in the box while the newer unit is already being used.

Edited October 20, 2005 by jacobsen1

[+krazymtbr & QT]

Heard about geocaching. Looked into it and thought about how fun it could be for about a week. Went out and bought a GPSr. Printed off 4 caches to look for for our first day. DNF'd on the first 2. They were by Fren-Z, little did we know how evil his hides can be. Finished the day finding the last 2. Went home and created an account. Been addicted ever since.

[+OzGuff]

Bought the GPS online. Registered with GC.com the same day the GPS arrived. Found first cache the next day. DNF'ed my first cache that same day. Became premium member about a month later.

 

Since I bought the GPS FOR geocaching the pre-registration wouldn't have been an issue.

[+frivlas]

My boss came into our weekly meeting and was talking about this fun thing he had done with his kids over the weekend. We all browsed over the the geocaching site and I registered during the meeting. I discovered there was one near our house that I thought we could find without a GPS. When the weekend hit, we went and found it, and had our first trail encounter while sucessfully looking for our second one. We were hooked. We have friends who we have introduced to it....we take them with up and get them hooked, then they go back and sign up later.

 

As a note - We've now been doing this for 6 months, just passed 1400 finds, and that boss that introduced me to it? He only found the one cache and never bothered to log it. sigh.

[Hugh Jazz]

It was back in the fall of '78, me and these two pals from high school were out big-game squirrel huntin' in the woods around Pittsburgh with slingshots. We chased a squirrel up under an old abandoned railroad trestle, where we stumbled on a most curious find. An old ammo can filled with cheap toys and a logbook. 'Course now the Internet and the GPS system, neither of these had been invented yet, so --you guessed it-- we were first to find.

 

Imagine our frustration at having to wait 23 years for our next find.

[+Miragee]

I heard about Gecocaching on a segment on "All Things Considered" on NPR. I didn't think I would be interested in going out all by myself, but I went to the site and printed out some pages for nearby caches and took them to my neighbor who has a little girl.

 

Then, about seven months later I decided to get a GPSr. I got a great deal on eBay on a Garmin Vista with the maps in a package deal.

 

I registered on the site and hung out in the Forums learning everything I could for several weeks. Finally, as if I were going on a week-long expedition, I got all my stuff together and got out of the house to look for an ammo can about five miles, as the crow flies, from my house.

 

It was a walk of about a mile. Near the end of the search, the arrow on my GPSr turned and I realized I had to cross a raging stream to get to the cache. In low afternoon light, I found a couple of places to leap across it.

 

Finally, I climbed up and around a tumble of boulders to find the cache. I was hooked . . .

 

I was practically giddy on the walk back to my car. That was the night the every-night dreams about Geocaching started . . .

[+Renegade Knight]

RK, go to your Account Details page, click on "show all logs for caches" and it should be at the very bottom.

Thanks.

 

I signed up on Jan 16th and got my first DNF on the 18th.

[+KKTH3]

We found out about geocaching from my sister and brother-in-law and we tagged along on a hunt with them while on vacation in the Seattle area. We didn't have our own GPSr (and neither did my sister - she was borrowing one from my parents) but we created our account when we got home that weekend and were dissappointed to find only 7 caches within 100 miles of our house.

 

I guess that one with my sister was really our first find, but since we didn't even have an account at that time we never logged it - our first real find came almost a full year later. We had picked up a GPSr somewhere in the meantime, but knowing we had so few caches in the area we never bothered going out geocaching ourselves. After a few months we were visiting family in Loveland and my other brother-in-law was reading a newspaper article about a local geocacher known as Tahosa so I showed him my GPSr that I had taken on the trip to Colorado and we took our families out to give it a try since his area had literally hundreds of caches nearby.

 

We tried a multi-cache in a nearby park and found all the waypoints and were directed to another area of town for the final cache. However, it was still winter in these parts and all this time outside was getting the kids a bit grumpy. We poked around a snowcovered hillside for a few minutes and realized finding the cache was not going to be very easy with so much snow around so we abandoned the hunt. That brother-in-law and his family have never gone geocaching again since that failure.

 

Months passed for us too until mid summer 2004 when we had a free weekend day to do something outside so we decided to see if we could find a local geocache. I printed up all the sheets for caches in town (up to about 4 or 5 at this point) and we were successful on the first one we tried. We then did a multi-cache downtown and decided we'd give it a bit more effort this go-around. That first cache was a traditional one and our son did trade out something, but I don't remember what it was. The second cache was a micro and we didn't have a pencil so I had to sign it a few days after we actually found it. The caches themselves weren't really the interesting thing to us that day though. It was finding the areas the caches brought us to that we really liked.

 

There has been a fair amount of caches that have popped up around home since then, but we still get most of our finds while on vacation rather than locally.

[+Jennifer&Dean]

Signed up on 7-31-01 and there weren't many caches in the area so I went back to college and didn't check in often. For graduation I got a Garmin Legend, and on 7-24-02 we made our first find. Just under a year from sign up to first find... but we've made up for it since!

-J

[+Old Bet]

I've always had an affection or maps and map reading, and I received my GPS unit as a holiday gift in December 2003. Didn't do much with it at first. Poking around on the Web I discovered the geocaching.com Web site. I created an account, since it was free, but I still didn't do much with my handheld. Other than use it to confirm that, yes, indeed, here I am.

 

In February of '04 I found my first cache while on a vacation to DisneyWorld. But it was not until I went into the woods with an experienced geocacher to research a newspaper story I was writing that I started understanding the what and how of geocaching. That was on June 26, 2004, which I consider the real starting date of my geocaching life.

 

Since then, I have enlisted my wife into our two person geocaching brigade. As we say in our profile, we don't consider ourselves geocachers, but we do seek caches as an added attraction when we are out and about on assorted excursions and treks. Somewhere along the way I paid to become a premium member, mainly because I think the gc Web site is a bargain and I want to support our hobby/sport/activity even if that means letting Jeremy & Co. make a few bucks. I think we get good value for our few dollars.

 

I've also joined the National Map Corps, which is another way I use my GPS now, and I've also started recovering benchmarks, usually while on NMC missions.

[+Old Bet]

I've always had an affection or maps and map reading, and I received my GPS unit as a holiday gift in December 2003. Didn't do much with it at first. Poking around on the Web I discovered the geocaching.com Web site. I created an account, since it was free, but I still didn't do much with my handheld. Other than use it to confirm that, yes, indeed, here I am.

 

In February of '04 I found my first cache while on a vacation to DisneyWorld. But it was not until I went into the woods with an experienced geocacher to research a newspaper story I was writing that I started understanding the what and how of geocaching. That was on June 26, 2004, which I consider the real starting date of my geocaching life.

 

Since then, I have enlisted my wife into our two person geocaching brigade. As we say in our profile, we don't consider ourselves geocachers, but we do seek caches as an added attraction when we are out and about on assorted excursions and treks. Somewhere along the way I paid to become a premium member, mainly because I think the gc Web site is a bargain and I want to support our hobby/sport/activity even if that means letting Jeremy & Co. make a few bucks. I think we get good value for our few dollars.

 

I've also joined the National Map Corps, which is another way I use my GPS now, and I've also started recovering benchmarks, usually while on NMC missions.

[+Shirpa]

Learned of caching from a friend. Researched site, bought GPS, created account, found 4 caches, became prmium member.

[+Ballooner]

I had heard about geocaching from this hiking guide of the Sandia Mountain Wilderness Area (east of Albuquerque, NM) written by this geocacher. I thought is was intriguing and intended to check into it sometime. The book guides hikers through this wilderness area using GPS waypoints for the trails and scenic areas.

 

A while later, I was hiking with a friend on the mountain. We had climbed up a 2 mile trail with about a 2000 ft. elevation rise and found this granite outcropping with a great view of the city below. I was taking the "look we made it to the top" picture of my buddy when he looked down and found this cache. It was an aluminum can with wingnut screw lid clamps wedged down in a crack. It was properly marked so we knew what it was. We signed the log and traded for stuff we had with us. I signed-up as a premium member 2 days later, logged the find and was hooked. I was surprized to see how many caches were scattered in these mountains that we had been walking by and never knew they were there. It really added a new aspect to our hiking.

[+drat19]

I signed up for my free account on 6/11/02, but didn't go out on a search until 7/6/02. There was exactly one cache hidden in Biloxi at the time...a micro called Biloxi Beacon located adjacent to the Biloxi Lighthouse, and hidden by a non-local who was visiting the area. So this was back in the days of a. vacation caches still allowed, and b. before "micro spew".

 

I would have gone home with a DNF on my first cache, but I was so fortunate to run into a fellow cacher on my first hunt: Breaktrack from Houston, TX, who was in the area and happened to be hunting for the same cache that same morning. We (well, he) found the cache after a few minutes searching, and I was hooked. I went on to find the only other 4 caches within 20 miles later that day (all full sizers: 2 tupperwares and 2 thermal water jugs).

 

-Dave R. in Biloxi

Edited October 21, 2005 by drat19

[+Sue Gremlin]

For my birthday, Joe got me a little GPS receiver for my Ipaq PDA, it's a little thing with no buttons on it. took us a while to learn how to get it to talk to my PDA, but we did it, and ventured out immediately to find our first cache, Hadrosaurus Foulkii. Our GPS only gave coordinates, and not in the right format, either, it didnt tell us how far we were from anything. Just a map and numbers. How we found our first cache, I will never know. We did though! We took nothing, and left a 2 Euro coin. Feeling the burn of addiction already, we went hunting for another, Teahouse Stroll, but only found the first stage. The format of ourcoordinates was different, and we didn't know how to convert them. We poked around for quite a while, but gave up. We went back this summer and found it!

[+Jamie Z]

First attempt, no find, made too many wrong turns driving. Second attempt, ran out of day light. Third times the charm, off we went searching for the Un-Orginal, found it. Wow, what a high.

 

Came back home, created the account and gleefully entered the found log.

But what about the DNF logs?

 

My first two searches were DNFs. Third time's a charm for me too, but it wasn't for another week or so after my DNFs.

 

Jamie

[+humanloofa]

I found a few cachers while camping in the woods, they introduced me and my son to caching. A week later, had to wait for payday, bought a GPS, than created an account, than sent in money.

[+martinell]

I heard about it from somewhere - I have no idea where. About a year later I was looking for a family activity and remembered something about it. I pulled up the web page and found a simple cache. We drove out to the location without a GPS and looked around until we found it.

 

We actually found a couple of them without the GPS, just map reading skills, before I finally broke down and bought one.

 

It wasn't until after we found the first one that I decided to sign up. A long time ago I stopped signing up for stuff on the internet until I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to participate in the said activity. I still get junk e-mail on one account from companies that I only wanted to check their product out 6 or 7 years ago.

[+VegasCacheHounds]

Signed up for an account for just me, went caching with my wife, my sister and her husband, found five caches that first day, then signed up for an account as a team.

 

I never did log any caches under the individual account

[+adambro]

Read about geocaching in a magazine. Signed up for an account. Then went in search of my first, a micro. Found it.

 

Two days later I found another four. In just over a week I'd had nine finds. I tend to cache alone, using public transport, during the week so that limits what caches I hunt.

 

adambro