Start here: your first geocache find

The whole thing in one paragraph

Somebody hid a container in a place they thought was worth visiting, published its coordinates, and put a logbook inside. You walk to the coordinates, search, find it, sign the log, put it back, and record online that you were there. That is the entire activity. Everything else on this site is detail about the parts of it people argue over.

Your first hour

Choose the right first cache. Not the closest one, not the most interesting-sounding one — the one with a low difficulty rating, a low terrain rating, and a steady run of recent finds. Recent logs are the single best evidence that the container is still in place.

Read the listing before you go. The description will tell you what the walk is like, whether the parking is obvious, and often what kind of container to expect. The hint is encrypted with a thirteen-place letter shift; you decide whether to read it, and the decoder is here if you do.

Stop looking at the screen. Your phone will get you to within a few metres and then stop being useful. From there you are reading the ground: what looks placed rather than fallen, what does not match its surroundings, where a container could sit out of a passer-by’s eyeline.

Sign, replace, log. Sign the log with the date. Put the container back at least as well hidden as you found it. This is the part newcomers get wrong most often and it is what decides whether the next person has the same experience. Then write a log online with something in it.

What you will run into immediately

Two things trip up almost everyone in the first week.

The first is accuracy. The arrow will say zero and the container will not be there. That is normal, it is not your phone being broken, and the gear section explains exactly why it happens.

The second is vocabulary. Listings and logs are written in a dense private language: muggle, DNF, FTF, TFTC, swag, attributes. Nobody explains it because everybody already knows it. The glossary page in this section is the explanation.

Where to go next

The two pages below are the foundations. Cache types tells you what you are actually walking to, which matters because a mystery cache and a traditional cache ask completely different things of you before you leave the house. The glossary decodes the language.

After that, the six reference sections take over: where caches are listed, what finds them, how to stay out of trouble, how to build one worth finding, what trackables are, and the long argument this site is named after.

What not to worry about yet

Newcomers routinely delay their first find over things that do not matter at this stage.

You do not need a caching name that means anything, a dedicated receiver, trade items, or an understanding of the cache types beyond traditional. You do not need to solve a puzzle, log elegantly, or know what a Wherigo is.

You need coordinates, a pen, and an hour. Everything else is available later, and most of it turns out to be optional permanently.

When you cannot find it

You will walk to a set of coordinates, search for twenty minutes and go home without a find. This happens to everybody, it happens to people with tens of thousands of finds, and it is not a sign that you have done anything wrong.

The container may be missing. It may be under snow, under leaf fall, or behind something that was not there when the hide was made. It may be six metres away because your fix and the owner’s fix disagree. Or it may be exactly where it should be and you looked past it, which is the most common explanation of all.

The thing to do is log it. A DNF (did not find) is a normal log type, not an admission of failure, and it is the only signal an owner gets that something might be wrong. Two or three DNFs in a row is what prompts a check. Cachers who quietly go home rather than logging are the reason broken caches sit unrepaired for months while everybody assumes they are simply hard.

Writing a log worth reading

The online log is the part newcomers rush, and it is the part cache owners actually care about.

“TFTC” (thanks for the cache) is the default and it is close to meaningless. It costs an owner nothing to receive and tells them nothing. A cache that took somebody a weekend to build and takes them an hour to maintain deserves two sentences.

Two sentences is genuinely enough. Say what the walk was like, or what you noticed at the spot, or that the container was damp and the log needs replacing. The last of those is worth more to an owner than any amount of praise, because it is the only way they learn about a problem without driving out to look.

Write it while it is fresh. Logs written a fortnight later from a list of coordinates are the ones that say TFTC, because by then there is nothing left to say.