That Very First Geocaching Discovery

Perhaps my family is a bit late to the geocaching scene. Even though I first interviewed Jeremy Irish, co-founder of Groundspeak (which operates Geocaching.com), in 2005, it took six years for us to catch the wave -- probably so our kids could grow old enough to appreciate the fun of "treasure" hunting in real life. As it turns out, there's been a cache located just outside my home since last December, and I never even knew it! Literally, I can see the cache's hiding spot from my office window. Life is funny.

The three founders of Groundspeak, with Jeremy Irish at center.

Geocaching can be addictive, so perhaps you're curious about the first cache discovered by the man behind Geocaching.com. If so, enjoy this snippet from Jeremy Irish:

CPU: What was in that first cache that you found?

Irish: I found a yellow 3 x 5 card box. Inside was a Sunny Delight drink, which is one of the reasons why we say no food in caches. It wasn’t very appetizing. And it had a disposable camera in it, which I thought was a pretty novel idea. A lot of people still do that today. They go develop it at the end to see who went to the cache. And that was pretty much it, plus a log book and a pencil. It was a really straightforward kind of basic cache.

I had recently moved from Washington State to Virginia, and I didn’t really know the area that well. But I got excited, bought the GPS receiver, and found through general research the location of a place I could park and do the hike. It was probably one of the worst hikes I’ve ever done. It was a hot day, unusually warm for the Pacific Northwest. The bugs were out in droves, and I ran out of water about halfway through. We were pretty unprepared for such a long hike. We had to go down to a lake and filter some water. It was just miserable, but when we got to the location and found the container, we were so excited by it, just the possibility of finding this thing, that it made the whole hike worth it. I thought, you know, if I can have a crappy hike and have a really enthusiastic experience finding a 3 x 5 card box in the woods, then this must be something that may be popular to other people.