The geocaching community is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s biggest game of hide and seek in 2025. The game is happening right now, all around you, in parks, urban areas, on mountain tops, and even underwater. Around 3.4 million geocaches are waiting to be found across the globe, including more 1,200 within 10 miles of Rochester.
Maybe you’ve heard of geocaching, but aren’t quite sure how it works.
•Someone hides a container (a geocache) outdoors for others to find.
•They post the location coordinates and other details through Geocaching.com.
•Other players use the free Geocaching® app or Geocaching.com to go outside and locate the container.
•Once found, they sign a logbook, rehide the container where they found it, and then share their experience online.
Geocaching makes it fun to explore the outdoors, discovering amazing locations and a robust player community in your home town and around the world. Whether you’re on vacation, exploring a local trail system, or just trying to gamify your exercise, this worldwide treasure hunt has been entertaining people for 25 years. It’s all powered by players who place geocaches, creating adventurous outdoor experiences for the world to enjoy.
Karen Fien of Spencerport enjoys being active outdoors and has been geocaching with her teenaged grandson, Cameron. She said, “We have really had a lot of fun geocaching this year. I am not as good at finding the caches as my grandson, but we have enjoyed trying to find them. We went to Cape Cod this summer and geocached with our family. It was a great way to check out the area.”
Cameron added, “We liked it so much that we created our own geocache, and love seeing what people have to say about the cache when they log it.”
Geocaching.com launched in September 2000 with just 75 geocache locations. Since then, community members have spread the game to more than 190 countries. There is even a geocache on the International Space Station, and a geocaching game piece on the Mars Rover! In 2024, a record 88.5 million “Found it!” logs were posted on Geocaching.com. And since the game began in 2000, more than 1.2 billion “Found it!” logs have been posted. These figures represent an extraordinary amount of global discovery, exploration, and adventure for everyone.
As geocaching embarks on the next 25 years, exciting additions from Geocaching HQ are making the game even better, including:
•Treasures: Launched in March 2025, geocachers can collect digital items by finding and logging geocaches needed for each Treasure collection.
•Adventures: Expanding the ways people explore and learn about the world around them through interactive, community-created, self-guided tours and experiences. There are more than 81,000 Adventures in 180+ countries.
The worldwide geocaching community is marking the 25th anniversary by hosting more than 100 (and counting) large-scale events, including Block Parties, Mega-Events, and Giga-Events. In doing so, they showcase another unique aspect of the game: the connections between people around the world, uniting through a shared spirit of outdoor adventure.
Learn more about geocaching, 25th anniversary celebrations, and more, at Geocaching.com.
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