On the 1st May 2000 President Clinton announced that the US Department of Defence's Global Positioning System. Which till then would only give civilian users location data to an accuracy of one hundred meters, would be made available un-encrypted. Enabling civilians to obtain co-ordinates with an accuracy of just ten meters.
Dave Ulmer from Oregon decided to mark this occasion by heading out to the local woods near his home in Beavercreek with a GPS unit and an old sealable plastic container filled with goodies such as stickers and free software CD’s. After finding a suitable location he hid the container and noted the co-ordinates from his GPS device.
Once he got home, he posted a note on an internet newsgroup, telling people that he had hidden some free stuff and giving out the co-ordinates. The only rule was that if people took anything out then they should replace it with something else and sign the log book he had left in the container to prove they had found it. Of course they should also post back to the bulletin board that they had found it.
This simple experiment turned into the global craze of GeoCaching and by 2013 there were over two million geo-caches hidden in locations around the world and literally hundreds of thousands of “geo-cachers” regularly searching for them. Ultimately it led to Toby Drury or “InvertorBoy” as he was known to his many fellow geo-cachers, walking down a quiet country road South East of Colchester in Essex, England. At 8pm on a pleasantly warm Saturday Evening. It would be dark in a few hours but Toby had his full geocaching kit with him including a torch.
For many geocachers the fun was in finding the caches, GPS units would only get you so close and after that it was a case of searching for the cache wherever it may have been hidden. In an old tree stump or hidden in bushes were common hiding places. Or for more built up locations the geocaches were often smaller hidden behind loose brickwork or cunningly attached using magnets under benches or on the backs of metal signs. Some geocachers had logged thousands of finds often travelling around the country or even the world in their search for yet more caches.
The twenty four year old Toby had a presentable record of 300 finds but was more interested in hiding caches and had so far placed over twenty caches in his home area. Each cache was elaborately designed to be well hidden and was posted on the geocaching site. He delighted the other geocachers by concocting bewildering stories explaining the reason for the location whilst giving cryptic clues as to what the searcher should look for. InvertorBoy had a strong following amongst the local Geocachers all keen to search for his clever and often amusing caches.
Swinging in a carrier bag by his side was his latest creation, which looked every bit like a large bolt head and nut, but was actually hollow allowing the miniature log sheet to be hidden inside. It would be magnetically attached to the railings beside a large set of a security gates he had noticed whilst out walking in the area looking for possible hiding places.
The story that he would post on the website would tell a tale of a secret underground bunker created at the height of the cold war to control the UK’s nuclear arsenal. Now abandoned and forgotten the bunker had been overrun by a race of super mice that were using it as their headquarters for their fight against the cats. Hidden in the fictitious story were oblique references to the number of the railing that the cache was attached to.
Toby was sure that the children that often went Geocaching with their parents would enjoy the story. That made Toby happy, Toby liked children.
