I found it via a post on Slashdot. I opened an account and saw Cache Cows’ “Entwive’s Tumor” was the nearest to my house (If it were still there, it would probably be the 100th closest now.)

I convinced Mrs. Cheesehead to let me buy a GPSr (Which I’m still using today, over four years later. Garmin Legends are pretty rugged!) And two days later, I had my first DNF! 🙁 (I guess I shouldn’t have started with a four star difficulty cache…)

I went back the next day to try again and found it, as well as my first fellow cacher on the trail (wiracer24… are they still active?)

What I’m kicking myself over is that I know I read about when Dave Ulmer hid the first cache after SA was removed and Jeremy Irish opened up the original GC.com site. For some reason, I just ignored it them, but I could have started back in 2000 rather than 2002. Oh well…

I have Vince Condela of the Fox6 News in Milwaukee to thank. While out hiking a couple years ago, in Piorio Nature preserve right by our place, we found our first cache. I don’t know its name, as it’s gone now. But I do remember finding it in the end of a log, right off the trail. We had no idea what we had just found, and just put it back the way we found it wondering what the heck geocaching is?

I came home and tried looking it up on the computer but must have had the spelling all wrong, because we found nothing.

(Two Years Later) I’m watching the evening news with the family and “Caching with Condella” comes on the screen. All three of us, at virtually the same time had a light bulb go off. This time I got the spelling right, and about 10 later we had our GPS’r, and our first cache… which incidentally is about 300 feet from that first cache I spoke of above, also located in a log!

Rewind to April of 2001.

I was in the market for a mapping gps and was doing some research on the GPS information.net website.

Somewhere buried in the hundreds of GPS links, I found a link to geocaching.com. I checked out the website and was grinning from ear to ear. A search of Wisconsin geocaches showed about 8 geocaches. The closest two were Ken’s “Pike Powder Hike”, and “New Prospect” (archived).

That same day, I plugged the info into my gps and waited for the kids to get home after school. I took the boys up and found Pike, then New prospect. We were hookd !

Those sure were the good old days, which I sincerely miss. There were only a handful of cachers in the area. It seemed like we took turns hiding caches. After someone hid a cache, we all went out and tried to find it within a couple days. It was fun to try to be the first finder.

ALL the geocaches involved scenic hikes to remote areas. Geocachers used their caches to bring the others to their favorite parks and places. We all tried to out-do each each other with creativity and beauty.

Ahhh, the good ‘ol days 🙂

I was in college in 2001 when a recent graduate of our geography department sent an email to several of us still in school about this new “game” called geocaching (or whatever it was called at the time). I read about it and thought it sounded interesting, so I did a search, but the closest cache was over 70 miles away from Mt. Pleasant, MI, which is where I was living at the time and I didn’t own a GPS, so I kind of forgot about it. About a year later my sister and my future wife pitched in to buy me a gps for christmas, and I occasionally thought about that game I had looked up, but never got around to doing it. In May 2005, I was working for the city of Mt. Pleasant (MI) when the city planner was talking about this new cache where you had to walk to an island in the river that went through town for one of the stages. This finally got me interested enough to look the game back up, and Lynn and I found our first geocache about a week later. A month later we purchased another gps unit so that Lynn could have one too, and I am still using the GPS that Lynn and my sister bought me in 2002. My biggest regret is that we didn’t take up caching back in 2002 when I first got my GPS, because we both love doing it so much now.

Last November I met a fellow nurse named Ralph. We started sending each other e-mails a couple of times a week, talking about what was going on in our lives and several times he mentioned geocaching. He commented how his dog loved geocaching and how relaxing it was. I had no idea what it was, I thought maybe it was something like frisbee golf 😳 ………. Well a dog would like that too! One evening being a little bored I did an internet search on geocaching and read all about it. Shortly after that I was talking to Ralph on the phone and after our conversation I decided that he just wasn’t going to be good dating material. He was older and excited about having more freedom now that his kids where grown. Well my youngest had just turned 4 at that time, my calendar was full and having more freedom was going to be a long time coming for me. So I sent Ralph an e-mail saying that I didn’t think it would work out for us to date, but geocaching sounded interesting and it would be great if he would take me out and show me what that was all about. I actually couldn’t wait and bought my own GPSr on “black friday” – 6am the morning after Thanksgiving at Gander Mountain (before I went to work). I found my first geocache the next day. A week later Ralph (Zuma) and I did go out geocaching. 9 months, over 500 finds and 52 hides later I still go geocaching with him and decided that he is fine dating material after all! I guess if I really didn’t want to go out with him I shouldn’t have made the directions to my house a multi-cache :lol:!

I first read about geocaching in a Milwaukee Sentinel article back in the summer of 2001. It was near the back of the “Metro” section, and couldn’t have been more than about 400 words. I already had a GPSr that I used for snowmobiling, so this sounded quite interesting.

I told my wife about it, she also said it sounded interesting, so off we went to find the cache closest to our house: Vernon Marsh (GC65A) by jvechinski. Did I forget to mention that our first attempt at this cache involved shorts, sandals, a 3-year old, and a 7 months pregnant wife? For those of you who remember this cache, it was about a 3/4 mile hike down a two-track running through a swamp (er… marsh). The flies and the mosquitoes were terrible. We wound up not finding the cache. My 3-year old daughter was crushed that we didn’t find the “treasure”. We took her out for Ice Cream and that seemed to smooth things over a bit.

After that first experience, I’m surprised we ever tried it again, but we did. We actually found our first cache later that summer in August of 2001 (under a different screen name). Been hooked since then.

I don’t really remember the year but must been around when it 1st started off. I heard about it over the internet (I know general). I looked at the prices of a GPS unit and was shocked by the sticker price. I then checked out the website to find out what caches were in my area. At the time I was In Virginia Beach and there were ZERO caches. Based on that I was not going to dish out lots of $$ to go no place close.

A few years later I decided to check into it again and GPS units cost less and caches were now all over the place.