As geocachers, we love milestones! We remember our first find, our first hide, the first Event we attended, our first international find, and so many other unforgettable moments. In the 25 years since geocaching began, the game itself has reached some major milestones, too!

Let’s take a look back at some of the biggest ones.

May 2, 2000: The U.S. government removes selective availability, and the accuracy of GPS technology instantly improves tenfold.

May 3, 2000: An Oregon man named Dave Ulmer puts the new accuracy to the test by placing a container near Beavercreek, Oregon. He shares the coordinates of his “geostash” with the online community. Within three days, two people had used GPS receivers to find the world’s first geocache. The cache is GCF when Geocaching.com is launched several months later.

September 2, 2000: Geocaching.com launches. At the time, there were approximately 75 listed geocaches worldwide.

November 3, 2000: Jeremy Irish, Elias Alvord, and Bryan Roth found the company now known as Geocaching HQ to support the game of geocaching. Initial revenue came from sales of 144 Geocaching t-shirts.

March 24, 2001: The first Event Cache occurs in Austin, Texas. Since then, nearly 500,000 geocaching events have been hosted worldwide!

May 24, 2001: The first Project A.P.E. Cache published in California. Today, two A.P.E. Caches remain in Brazil and Washington state.

August 30, 2001: Jeremy Irish released the first Travel Bug®, “Deadly Duck: Envy.”

September 20, 2001: Moun10Bike places the world’s second geocoin in a cache near Deception Pass, Washington (he kept the first geocoin in his personal collection).

March 4, 2002: Introducing Geocaching Premium membership! Those who joined during the first year are known as Charter members.

April 26, 2003: The first Cache In Trash Out® (CITO) was held near Pittsburgh, PA. Since the initial launch of the CITO initiative, more than 46,000 CITO events have been held around the world!

2004: EarthCache™, a partnership between Geocaching HQ and the Geological Society of America, launches. The first EarthCache (GCHFT2) is located in New South Wales, Australia.

May 27, 2006: The first Mega-Event, GeoWoodstock 4, is held near Dallas, Texas.

December 2007: The 500,000th geocache is published.

October 2008: Release of the first official Geocaching® app.

October 14, 2008: Video game developer Richard Garriott places a geocache and Travel Bug® on the International Space Station. The cache was found for the first time in November 2013 by NASA astronaut Rick Mastraccio. The Travel Bug remains on the ISS for three years, accumulating more than 350 million miles as it orbited the Earth.

March 2010: The 1,000,000th geocache is published.

July 2, 2010: Signal the Frog® attends his first Mega-Event at Geowoodstock VIII in Carnation, Washington.

August 20, 2011: The first International Geocaching Day, which we now celebrate every third Saturday in August. That same day, Geocaching HQ hosts the first Geocaching Block Party in Seattle.

June 6, 2012: The first geocaching GeoTours launch: Columbus Georgia Riverwalk GeoTour, Star-Spangled GeoTour, Captain John Smith GeoTour.

February 2013: The 2,000,000th geocache is published.

August 16, 2014: The first Giga-Event, Project MUNICH2014 – Mia san Giga!, is held in Germany.

July 30, 2020: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, containing a geocaching trackable code, launches with an Atlas V-541 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rover arrives in Jezero Crater, Mars on February 18, 2021. Geocaching is now interplanetary!

August 20, 2022: HQ hosts the Geocaching 20th Anniversary Celebration at Seattle Center. The event was originally scheduled for August 15, 2020, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2025: The geocaching community celebrates 25 years of geocaching with worldwide Block Parties, Community Celebration Events, and other commemorations. There are currently more than 3.4 million geocaches available to find on Geocaching.com.