“I found it!” I yell. My partner rushes towards me, grabs my arm and gives me hand back up. “Let me see,” she says. I hand the Tupperware container to her and she lifts off the top.

We peer inside. A notebook, a pen, and three flashlight keychains. I feel a hot rush of accomplishment. We’ve been searching for almost an hour, and have combed through the entirety of the little park. This was, without a doubt, what we were looking for. I lift out the notebook and mark it with our aliases, along with the date and time. Returning it to the container, my partner replaces the lid and shoves it underneath the fence where I found it.

“Mission accomplished,” she announces.

We’re standing in Chiba Garden, a beautiful Japanese ornamental park located in one corner of North Vancouver’s Waterfront Park, near Lonsdale Quay. I live less than two blocks away, and truthfully, I didn’t even know that this little oasis existed. It’s walled on all sides, and punctuated with landscaped streams and little stone monuments. I’m holding my iPhone in my hand and it’s vibrating, buzzing off a little notification telling me that we’re in the right place. As I log our find, the vague marker on the Geocaching App turns from green dot into a tiny smiley face. Fitting. The thrill of the hunt and our find has brought a grin to our faces.

On May 3rd, 2000, Dave Ulmer of Beaverton, Oregon, hid the world’s first known geocache. After filling a black plastic bucket with various items, including a logbook, a slingshot handle, and a can of beans, he headed out to the woods outside of Portland and hid it in a bushy area just off of a quiet country road. Dubbing it a “geo stash”, he then logged its GPS (global positioning system) coordinates onto a usenet newsgroup, an online discussion group similar to an Internet forum. Two days prior, the American government had led a massive upgrade to the GPS system that suddenly allowed more accurate positioning for civilian users, and Ulmer wanted to see if the improvements could be used to allow others to track down objects in unfamiliar areas. His first cache was a success. By May 6th, the first cache had been found twice, and other geo stashes began popping up all around the United States. By the end of the month, stashes were being logged as far away as Australia, and the hide-and-seek activity had been re-dubbed “geocaching”.

Since Ulmer’s first geocache, the activity has continued to attract new participants, or geocachers, from across the globe. Over the years, and alongside the increasing accessibility, accuracy, and affordability of GPS technology, hundreds of thousands of geocaches have been hidden, from major urban centres to rural, nearly inaccessible mountain sites. With the introduction of smartphones, the potential to access geocaches is now a constant opportunity, as we carry around these GPS-enabled devices in our pockets and purses.

While the essence of geocaching has remained the same since those foundings years, the activity has mutated to include a more commercialized form. Now with an official website and smartphone app, geocaching’s popularity is on the rise. Geocaching events worldwide draw in enthusiasts by the hundreds, while official merchandise can be purchased online. Trackables, small official game pieces stamped with a tracing code, are hidden and then moved between geocaches. The official site/app has both a beginner and premium version, the latter only accessible via monthly subscription. Hundreds of local and regional independent geocaching organizations offer beginner and expert seminars. Geocachers refer to ordinary people, those unaware of the geocaches around them, as “muggles” — a reference to the non-magical, oblivious human population in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

In Vancouver, geocaching has exploded in popularity. Since its introduction into the region shortly after Dave Ulmer’s first geocache south of the border in 2000, approximately 2150 caches have been hidden across the metro Vancouver area. When I first downloaded the geocaching app, I was taken aback by the amount of caches dotted all over its map of the Lower Mainland. In some places, caches are so numerous that their marked locations overlap with each other. Within an eight block radius of my apartment, there are 19 geocaches. In Stanley Park, there are 37. While they vary in degree of difficultly, anyone with a GPS device, access to the Internet, a keen eye and a little bit of patience have access to most, if not all, of these hidden treasure chests.

Caches range in size, and can contain a multitude of varying objects. Caches on the smaller end of the scale are known as microcaches, and are often no bigger than a pen lid. I found one of these in Chinatown’s Sun-Yat Sen park, hidden among the trees, and barely distinguishable from the surrounding foliage. Bigger caches, some many feet wide, are often no easier to find. I walked past a 3 foot wide cache in downtown Vancouver several times while on the hunt. It was placed so inconspicuously with its surroundings that I did not even realize that it was what I was looking for.

CatapultJeff is the alias of one of Vancouver’s early geocaching pioneers. As one of the founding members of the Metro Vancouver Geocaching Association (www.mvgeocaching.com), he has been involved in the Vancouver geocaching scene for over 15 years. Speaking to me over the phone under the condition of anonymity (geocachers are predominately identified by their geocaching aliases, and others can track their progress using these names), he recalls his first encounter with the activity. After being introduced to the geocaching by an outdoorsy friend, they spent an afternoon in Coquitlam tracking down a few caches using a GPS device. He was hooked.

“At that point there, I said to myself, I need a GPS. I need to do this!” says Jeff. After his introduction to the activity, Jeff has found thousands of geocaches throughout Vancouver, British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest and the Western United States. As someone who has been active in geocache since its earliest days in Vancouver, he has witnessed it sweep in popularity in the region — especially in the mid-2000s, as GPS technology became more accessible.

“New technology has really opened it up to more people. You don’t have to go out and buy a $500 unit now, you can just download the app,” he says. Using the official Geocaching app available for iPhones and Android smartphones, both beginner and advanced cachers have access to a seemingly-endless amount of geocaches, locally and beyond.

However, Jeff prefers to remain old-school, and is on his fourth GPS device. While smartphones have the benefit of accessibility, the traditional handheld GPS give a much more accurate location.

“A regular GPS has the satellites above it, so you can use it out in the middle of nowhere,” Jeff explains. “That was the big thing for me, because it is so much fun to go hiking and find a geocache. Now, I do use my phone as well, but mostly just to go back and re-log my caches.”

Another major benefit of using a handheld GPS is its functionality outside of cell service range. For any geocachers with hiking experience, this opens up many opportunities for finds in the backcountry. In Jeff’s opinion, this is one of the fundamental advantages of getting involved in the activity — suddenly, the cacher has a reason to get out into new territory, explore new locations, and access new areas that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.

“There’s so many little parks, and areas that I’ve run across, and beautiful waterfalls that I’ve found that I just go ‘wow, I’d never come across here unless I was trying to find a cache,’” Jeff says.

As one of the organizers for Metro Vancouver Geocaching, Jeff is also witness to the variety that the region’s geocachers bring to the activity. When I asked him about the demographics that he sees coming out to geocaching events, he describes a group whose only similarities are their differences — and their passion for the thrill of the hunt.

“There are young kids that drag their mothers out, to older people that are retired,” he says. “There is such a wide spectrum of people from all ages and all cultures. There are people on disability with no jobs alongside CEOs of big companies. They all just want to go out and find an adventure.”

However, as more caches are hidden and more people are introduced to the sport, Jeff expresses some concern about the future of geocaching.

“I have great worry for it. I’ve noticed there’s a lot less quality in the hides. I’ve talk to several people about this. In the city area, the quality of the containers has gone down. The more we trample into the bushes and off the trails, we leave a larger footprint than we should when we’re in parks in the city area. This has caused us to get on the radar of the Parks Board in the Lower Mainland,” he says.

Several years ago, the City of Surrey considered banning geocaches in its parks due to damage to trees in Sunnyside Acres Urban Forest. While this ban was never passed, all of Metro Vancouver’s city park boards now require cachers to obtain a permit for any geocaches hidden in city parks. Failure to obtain a permit or permission from the Parks Board can result in the geocache being destroyed.

While most geocachers are usually concerned with the environment and take care not to disturb natural areas, it is becoming more difficult to control the quality of the caches and cachers that are active on the scene. There is a set of guidelines listed online by www.geocaching.com, with rules that include obtaining permission from the landowner, ensuring that they do not damage or otherwise endanger public property, and properly labelling the cache’s container. However, because there is no regulatory body that physically checks every new geocache that is hidden, responsibility for each individual geocache lies with its original owner. While this results in a grassroots approach to the activity and allows for greater accessibility for those interested in hiding caches, it can also result in low quality geocaches, over-saturation in a particular area, and cachers unwittingly hiding things in restricted areas — such as near government property, schools, and other protected sites.

There have been dozens of documented and well-publicized cases of geocachers hiding things that have inadvertently resulted in police being brought in to investigate suspicious packages. In March 2012, Disneyland California was locked down for more than four hours after a security guard discovered a camouflaged PVC pipe hidden in a tree near the park’s entrance. As press caught wind of the incident and began reporting it across local media outlets, the geocache’s owner called in to police to explain its origin. However, this was only after a bomb squad was called in the investigate, tying up police resources and costing Disneyland its Saturday morning revenue.

Similarly, Niagara Falls called in an explosive disposal unit in May 2014, after an individual called police to report a man hiding a container under a lamp post near the city’s tourist information centre. The suspicious package was eventually cleared as a geocache, but not without the police force first giving the area a thorough investigation.

These types of incidents are costly in both time and resources for law enforcement and parks professionals, and they also result in bad press for a hobby whose doctrine is entirely in the spirit of fun. The www.geocaching.com website includes an offer of a free premium subscription for police departments and park officials, in an attempt to quash these types of incidents before they arise.

For his part, CatapultJeff insists that these are some of the types of problems that can be easily fixed by connecting with your local community of geocachers.

“I believe through education, by teaching people how to hide geocaches and how to look for geocaches, we can lessen the environmental footprint that we leave, and therefore become better stewards for it. That way, we can keep this hobby of ours going for many years into the future,” he says. “If you see an event, go to it! Doing be shy, geocachers are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Ask questions, everyone will give you advice and help you out.”

My partner and I have been loitering outside the Telus World of Science plaza for over half an hour. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and the area is packed with families visiting the dome, as well as walkers, joggers and bikers weaving along the crowded seawall. We’ve checked under the benches, around the staircases, and in every obvious nook and cranny within a twenty meter radius. Still, “False Creek #6” is nowhere to be found, and the muggles in the area are beginning to eye us with suspicion.

Although my iPhone is buzzing, telling us that we’re close, within ten meters, frustration is starting to eat away at my enthusiasm. Despite the fact that we’ve already logged five geocaches today, we were gunning for the sixth, which would have given us a new daily record.

“Might be time to throw in the towel on this one,” my partner says, leaning against the railing at the end of the pier.

She’s right. Opening up the cache’s page on my app, I select log cache. After selecting DNF — did not find, a little blue frowning face appears at the cache’s mapped location.

Although we were unable to locate our final cache of the day, it doesn’t feel like a failure. Rather, it cemented a sort of stubbornness, strengthening our resolve to come back and search for it another day. Which is, after all, the entire point of going geocaching — exploring new areas, getting outside, and most of all, revelling in the thrill of the hunt.