Open Space 6

The Open Space 6 letterbox (GC190) existed before geocaching. It existed even before the very first cache hidden by Dave Ulmer. It was a letterbox, and the cache page long displayed that date of 1998; today it carries 15 January 2001, the day its owner “Jim Dick, Jr.” registered on the geocaching.com site.

Letterboxing is an English pastime born in 1854, when a guide left a box in Dartmoor National Park meant to collect visiting cards. The custom rests on two objects: the box holds a stamp, with which the visitor marks their own notebook, and in exchange they leave the imprint of theirs in the box's logbook. Geocaching absorbed the tradition under the name letterbox hybrid, and Geocaching HQ credits Open Space 6 with being the first one, with one reservation: GC2D, older in the database, was never found and may have been reclassified after the fact.

Jim Dick taught GPS use at REI and converted his letterboxes as the game came into being, hence a whole Open Space series. The cache, adopted by Team Tuxawuxa, was long the oldest one still in play in New Mexico. It is archived today, like the rest of the series: the only survivor is the virtual cache Open Space 7 (GC191), where you photograph yourself in front of the stone ring of a collapsed cairn.