Your pulse-quickens. Your jaw drops. And you think, “No way!” It’s the “Aha!” reward of finding a geocache that’s a unique container, cleverly hidden or reveals an amazing location. Maybe it’s even all three of those elements rolled into one geocache.

Now you have nearly two million active geocaches to choose from for your adventure. You can celebrate the best of those geocaches by rewarding that geocache a shiny new Favorite Point.

Some geocaches have tallied hundreds of Favorite Points, some have even earned more than a thousand Favorite Points. And your Favorite Point matters.

A Favorite Point is a blue ribbon award that makes a geocache owner’s day. Favorite Points are your way of saying Thank You to the geocacher who hid and maintains the geocache. It’s also a way to let other geocachers know that geocache is well worth the journey.

Here’s the story of how Favorite Points work. Premium Members earn one Favorite Point for every ten geocaches they find. They can reward their points to any geocache where they logged, “Found it.” Basic Members who upgrade to Premium Membership receive Favorite Points accordingly to their past finds.

Searching by Favorite Points also offers a big time-saving advantage, since you won’t have to sort through page after page of search results to find the best geocaches in an area. The one-click solution is an easy way to instantly see which geocaches leave your fellow geocachers in awe.

You can help out new geocache hiders. Add a comment below and tell us what makes a geocache worthy of a Favorite Point?

In the hide and seek adventure of geocaching sometimes people find more than just geocaches. They find companionship, camaraderie and even love. Valentine’s Day is celebrated this week, and more than a few couples will show their love by sharing the adventure of geocaching. Couples combine their passion for exploration out on the geocaching trail. Sometimes these love stories lead to marriage proposals. You guessed it – those marriage proposals often involve an engagement ring in a geocache.

Geocaching HQ has compiled a series of Geocaching Love story videos from around the world. Couples from the United States, Germany and the Czech Republic share their stories. See how geocaching helps couples grow closer as they search for adventure. Happy Valentine’s Day from Geocaching HQ.

Geocachers grab headlines around the world as Ambassadors of Adventure, Everyday Explorers or just those people doing that new outdoor tech thing. While geocaching is not new to us, more and more people are seeing geocaching in the news and in TV shows.

You’re part of an emerging hobby that gets people outside and into adventure. Geocachers are a global band of tech-guided explorers some five million strong. Sometimes the geocaching adventure is just around the corner, other times the hunt delivers geocachers to the top of a mountain. But people always love to hear about the geocaching journey, especially in the media.

In the past weeks and months, geocaching has appeared in publications around the globe. Geocaching was featured as a tool to see and experience the world in a new way in the USAToday video, “Want a modern day treasure hunt? Go geocaching.” Geocaching Co-Founder Bryan Roth helped Swiss readers of the magazine The Gentleman’s Guide (p.33) learn more about the addictive hobby. A police officer, who’s also a geocacher, used the Geocaching app to help find a lost hiker. The story made national news in the United States. Even airline passengers are reading about geocaching in the Alaska Airlines Magazine.

Geocaching delivers something most technologies cannot – and it’s worth writing about. Geocaching takes people outside to connect with each other. Every time you sign a log book or replace a geocache where you just found it, you’re adding to the story of that location. You connect to a community with each geocache you find. You also care for the environment along the way. It’s a newspaper article or television story that never gets old.

You can continue reading too. You can always find geocaching in the news through this link.