Geocache History

[+Cswageo]

Hello geo-community,

 

I wanted to ask about the history of the app. What challenges did HQ have before I joined on 12/26/22? The Cosmic Quest Challenge happened last year but I wanted to know if it wasn't the first cache challenge. So between the day the Geocaching app we use was created and the day I joined, I'm all for knowing the history of the game. I know you'll add news on the Geocache Blog and I look every once in a while. I'm always up for earning new cache souvenirs and new treasures. I'd love to know what Signal the Frog accomplished in life and to know when he met and adopted Tracker and their history.

[+hzoi]

On 6/28/2025 at 12:56 AM, Cswageo said:

What challenges did HQ have before I joined on 12/26/22?

 

There's a full list of souvenirs here.

 

I don't think we qualified for them all (I know I missed 3 days of the 31 Days of Geocaching back in August 2013, due to my daughter's birth), but we've gotten a fair number over the years if you want to scroll through our souvenirs.

[+Bear and Ragged]

On 6/28/2025 at 6:56 AM, Cswageo said:

I wanted to ask about the history of the app. What challenges did HQ have before I joined on 12/26/22? The Cosmic Quest Challenge happened last year but I wanted to know if it wasn't the first cache challenge. So between the day the Geocaching app we use was created and the day I joined, I'm all for knowing the history of the game.

 

Caching was going on well before the app came along!

[+The A-Team]

4 hours ago, hzoi said:

There's a full list of souvenirs here.

 *Partial 

 

There's a bunch missing from there. My lists should be complete: https://thea-team.net/souvenir

[+niraD]

15 hours ago, Bear and Ragged said:

Caching was going on well before the app came along!

And people were using smartphone apps well before Groundspeak introduce its apps.

[+Snoogans]

On 6/28/2025 at 1:56 AM, Cswageo said:

 

Geocaching history is all over these forums. I know they are glacially slow now, but this activity/sport/hobby/obsession was shaped and molded right here.

 

Did you know that once there was no way to discover trackables? It was a huge argument. Look up "counting coup" from two decades+ ago. It was prophesied that I would destroy geocaching for encouraging folks to count coup on travel bugs.

 

There was a time when a Mega Event was unheard of and before too long there was discussion on what to call an event that eclipses a Mega. 

 

There was this guy who once gave out 13,000 caches, in the One Degree of Separation Project, before the first ever mega event (12,500+ were "crappy" 35mm film cans) and they were hidden all over the world but it was also prophesied THAT would destroy geocaching too. (Snoogans' Law - If you're not having fun geocaching, you're doin' it wrong. And if your conservative argument against something is to prevent the demise of geocaching, you've just lost the entire argument.)

 

Geocaching history is filled with interesting debate and drama right here in these forums. Sadly, the most interesting stuff is back in the mists of time and many of those folks are now caching on a different plain of existence,

 

I just revived a thread from 2007. Look how many are still premium members and charter members. History abounds here and at events.

Edited July 1 by Snoogans

[+hzoi]

7 hours ago, Snoogans said:

Geocaching history is all over these forums. I know they are glacially slow now, but this activity/sport/hobby/obsession was shaped and molded right here.

 

I miss the busier days. Now that my work computer no longer blocks the forums, maybe I'll spend some more time here. Unless my drunk uncle Pete finds out and fires me.

 

7 hours ago, Snoogans said:

Look up "counting coup" from two decades+ ago.

 

(or just click here)

 

Side note just for @Snoogans, I had fun seeking out your Family Outing cache last month. Worth the diversion off I-10. (Not saying much, I know, I hate driving I-10. But still. Fun.)

[+hzoi]

19 hours ago, The A-Team said:

On 6/30/2025 at 2:06 PM, hzoi said:

There's a full list of souvenirs here.

 *Partial 

 

OK, OK, partial.

[+hzoi]

8 hours ago, niraD said:

And people were using smartphone apps well before Groundspeak introduce its apps.

 

And before that, just the manual way.

 

I started caching in Germany, and mein Deutsch war nicht sehr gut. (Still isn't.) So I had to copy each listing, run it through Altavista's Babelfish for a crappy translation, then I'd distill it into notes in a little book and use that with the manually-entered waypoint on my Garmin 60CSx.

 

So much easier with the app these days. But I had fun then.

[+Snoogans]

45 minutes ago, hzoi said:

 

Side note just for @Snoogans, I had fun seeking out your Family Outing cache last month. Worth the diversion off I-10. (Not saying much, I know, I hate driving I-10. But still. Fun.)

Thanks. Do you remember Sublime Submissions? That guy went there because it's near the town of Sublime.

 

That area is special to me, My Row vs Wade and Banjo Music aka Why is Daddy Crying? are now both archived but they were not far from there on the Navidad River. They were the stuff of local legend. I shut them down because more than a couple times people cut across private land and got escorted out by shotgun. There were a couple fun threads from those. The one where I asked what the geocaching equivalent of the mile high club was, got locked and deleted but the responses were fun while it lasted. The other one about the escort is buried here somewhere.

 

Did you notice that's a segregated cemetery? Graves going back before the civil war. 

Also, Kinky Friedman and another writer whose name escapes me, used to hang out at the two rural bars in Vienna (pronounced VY-anna) just a couple miles further down the dirt road.

[+The Leprechauns]

10 hours ago, Snoogans said:

Geocaching history is all over these forums.

 

Amen to that, from someone who started posting in the forums back in 2002, before Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram, Reddit or any other social media.  I remember, a few months after I joined, I made it a point to read ALL the prior forum discussion threads, and I've kept current ever since.  That's nigh to impossible now, so for newer geocachers I would recommend reviewing the "Release Notes" and "Announcements" forum sections to see about changes in features and rules over the years.  I also recommend the forum's search feature to find prior discussions about the same subject. 

 

The Geocaching Blog is also a good source of historic information, as noted by the OP.

Edited July 1 by The Leprechauns

[+Cswageo]

I don't think I've heard of Sublime Submissions nor the history of trackables.

[+hzoi]

On 7/1/2025 at 4:12 PM, Snoogans said:

Thanks. Do you remember Sublime Submissions? That guy went there because it's near the town of Sublime.

 

Not familiar with that one. I'm a relatively new arrival to south Texas, moved to San Antonio in 2023. But I see you have more hides in Houston, and with my sister living there now, I'll get out that way more.

 

(I lived in El Paso for a year and a half a while back, but that doesn't seem to count as "Texas" as much as southern New Mexico. They don't even have H-E-B, for crying out loud.)

[+Snoogans]

7 hours ago, hzoi said:

 

Not familiar with that one. I'm a relatively new arrival to south Texas, moved to San Antonio in 2023. But I see you have more hides in Houston, and with my sister living there now, I'll get out that way more.

 

The caches of mine that remain in that area are the ones that I didn't have time to remove. They're nothing special.

Narfle the Garthok! is at the facility where I worked for 30 years before Hurricane Harvey destroyed it. I calculated the volume of water in the basement alone to be equivalent to the weight of a cruise ship and there was 5 more feet of water in my office on the 1st floor.  I hear it's scheduled for implosion, so I'll be archiving it just before. that happens.

 

My advice is to go to a Houston Area event to two. We were always the fun bunch of all the Texas Groups. You'll probably get an earful if you drop my name to the right person.

Same goes for events in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. 

Get outta Texas as soon as you can. The weather there is an abusive relationship. I spent 47 of my 58 years there. Flat and hot is not my aesthetic but the job is what kept me there 34 years extra.

[+Snoogans]

This if for the benefit of the OP since they are interested in history.  It's an interesting thread to read and related to my Tree of Angst because one of the branches sprouted there.

 

I'm telegraphing what may become a future page in history linking that thread.  I've had the outline of Phase 2 in my head for about 18 years. This time the monster won't have an abnormal brain. But it will still be a monster.

[+JL_HSTRE]

On 7/1/2025 at 7:42 AM, niraD said:

And people were using smartphone apps well before Groundspeak introduce its apps.

 

What and when was the first geocaching app?

 

I didn't know anybody with an iPhone until 2009, and the first official app was out that year. I don't think the API came out for another couple years.

 

When I started with my Droid in 2010 I was using GeoBeagle or something variant thereof, which was clearly not new.

[+niraD]

2 hours ago, JL_HSTRE said:

What and when was the first geocaching app?

I have no idea what the first geocaching app was. But I was using an Android smartphone for geocaching before Groundspeak had their first app. IIRC, I started by transferring the routine I used with my Palm Pilot to my Android smartphone, except my Android smartphone had Google Maps. Then I started using GeoBeagle, then GeoHunter (a fork of the GeoBeagle code base), then NeonGeo (which supported corrected coordinates for puzzles via the PCN long before Groundspeak's app supported corrected coordinates for puzzles, and was my first app to use Groundspeak's API).

 

2 hours ago, JL_HSTRE said:

I didn't know anybody with an iPhone until 2009, and the first official app was out that year. I don't think the API came out for another couple years.

 

One of the first iPhones that I saw was in 2007, when a coworker showed me his new iPhone, and used it to show me the YouTube video Will It Blend? - iPhone. Yes, I watched a video of someone pulverizing an iPhone in a blender, on a coworker's iPhone.

 

2 hours ago, JL_HSTRE said:

When I started with my Droid in 2010 I was using GeoBeagle or something variant thereof, which was clearly not new.

Yeah, I knew a GeoBeagle developer from work, so I started using it before it reached v1.0, so I was using it in 2009.

[+geodarts]

I started with a bunch of note that I rended to lose, got a palm pilot to help with that, but began using the iPhone app Geosphere in 2008 and held on to until around 2019.  It set the standard for what an app could be and had features that still go beyond other caching apps.  In order to delay the inevitable I held out upgrading the iPhone for as long as possible.

There is a remarkable history to the game, some of it developed as Groundspeak built on a simple stash hidden by Dave Ulmer, some of it involved competing databases.  I used to go into to go into of the old Usenet groups as well as various forums to learn about what came before I learned about the game.  It can be a fun exercise as long as you don’t fall into the rabbit hole.

[+cerberus1]

20 hours ago, JL_HSTRE said:

What and when was the first geocaching app?

I didn't know anybody with an iPhone until 2009, and the first official app was out that year. I don't think the API came out for another couple years.

When I started with my Droid in 2010 I was using GeoBeagle or something variant thereof, which was clearly not new.

 

The other 2/3rds was using her Blackberry and Trimble Outdoors at the end of 2005. 

It was as accurate as the Blue Legends we were using at the time...  

[+cerberus1]

Since we're reminiscing...    I really miss the so-easy-to-use Windows Phone Groundspeak Geocaching Live app...

The OS was so simple, yet few were interested. It's what the current billing is based on (PM to play) IIRC.