10 Year Anniversary Micro Geocoin

Take me to the site of the Original Stash

In celebration of ten years since the first geocache was hidden at N 45° 17.460 W 122° 24.800 by Dave Ulmer, I wish to travel to Estacada, Oregon, United States, and be placed in the cache by the Original Stash Tribute Plaque (GCGV0P) which commemorates this location.

Once I've been there for a while, and have been discovered by several cachers, this mission will be updated to begin my trip back to my owner.
 

First to discover: Dunavant
First to move: Cancao

How geocaching got started

Until 2000, the U.S. government degraded GPS signals using something called Selective Availability (SA). SA allowed the U.S. and its allies to use special GPS receivers to get very accurate location information while preventing civilian GPS receivers from having as much precision.

In May 2000, SA was officially turned off (mostly because the U.S. government developed a way to degrade the accuracy of GPS to specific geographic regions). Suddenly, like magic, civilian GPS receivers that formerly were accurate only to about 300 feet became accurate to 30 feet. This new level of accuracy offered some interesting, creative possibilities.

Three days after SA was turned off, Dave Ulmer posted a message in the sci.geo.satellite-nav USENET newsgroup with coordinates of a “stash” he had hidden that contained software, videos, books, food, money, and a slingshot.

Earlier in the day, in the same newsgroup, Ulmer had proposed a worldwide “stash hunt,” where people would post GPS waypoints (coordinates saved in a GPS receiver) on the Internet that would lead searchers to hidden goodies. While Ulmer envisioned thousands of stashes tucked in places all over the world, he had no idea how popular his idea would become.

By the end of May, in a Yahoo! Group devoted to the new sport, a member named Matt Stum suggested that the sport be called geocaching in order to avoid some of the negative connotations associated with drugs and the word stash. (A cache is a hidden place where goods or valuables are concealed.) Geocaching had a nice ring to it, and because it didn’t sound like a bad Cheech and Chong movie, the name stuck.

The original cache is long gone, but there’s a newer one at the location and even a plaque that commemorates the world’s first official geocache. If you’ve ever in the Portland, Oregon area, think about making a pilgrimage to the shrine.