By Gabe Themar
Geocaching HQ is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Geocaching provides people all around the world, including Hillsborough County residents, with a chance to explore the outdoors, discover new locations, and hunt for hidden treasure.
Geocaching as a hobby is organized by locals. Anyone can fill up a container with assorted items and a logbook. Then, they hide that container somewhere outdoors, from public parks to the tops of mountains to underwater locations, and post the cache and its location coordinates on the Geocaching website. Anyone who wants to find that geocache can download the free Geocaching app, use the GPS on their phone to locate the coordinates and then look around the area to uncover the hidden cache. From there, seekers can jot their name into the logbook inside and share their discovery on social media.
Geocaching is a global hobby, with around 3.4 million geocaches hidden worldwide. Florida has over 39,000 caches across the state, 2,000 of which are ready to be found within 20 miles of downtown Tampa.
For Lithia residents who want to give geocaching a try, the Osprey Observer sponsors a cache in FishHawk Ranch off Lithia Pinecrest Road. Interested hunters can get its coordinates from www.geocaching.com or from the free app.
Geocaching launched its website in September 2000 and began with 75 cache locations. In the 25 years since, geocachers have spread the sport to more than 190 different countries and into space on the International Space Station and Mars Rover. In 2024, the website recorded a record 88.5 million posts uploaded to the platform showcasing found caches, adding to the 1.2 billion total discovery posts.
“The worldwide geocaching community is marking the 25th anniversary by hosting more than 100 (and counting) large-scale events,” said Geocaching HQ, “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.”
In addition to celebrating 25 years of treasure hunting, Geocaching HQ is also planning on expanding its platform and draw for the next 25 years by introducing community-created, interactive, self-guided tours at their cache locations. Geocaching has also added digital items that can be collected via logging cache discoveries. This feature was launched in March.
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