Earthcache I - a simple geology tour of Wasp Head

The Earthcache I - a simple geology tour of Wasp Head geocache (GCHFT2) was placed on 10 January 2004 on a rocky point in Murramarang National Park, on the south coast of New South Wales in Australia. It is the world's first earthcache, and it is still in play.

Its author, Gary Lewis "geoaware", then ran the education programmes of the Geological Society of America, which had been looking since 2003 for ways to interest the general public in earth sciences; one of its members had mentioned a brand-new game, geocaching. On holiday in Australia with his children, Lewis imagined, as he tells it, "a place where the Earth would be the treasure": a cache with no box and no logbook, where the geological site serves as the container and you validate your visit by answering the owner from what you observe on the spot.

The route strings together six stops along the rock platform. Some 280 million years ago, the place was a cold sea floor where icebergs calved from Australian glaciers dropped their stones as they melted. All of that can still be read in the rock: fossilised worm burrows, thick shells of bivalves and brachiopods, a bryozoan colony, a once-molten vein that the ocean has carved into a corridor. Nothing is to be collected; this is a national park, the one with kangaroos lying on the beach and spotted gums running down to the sea.

Geocaching HQ made it its geocache of the week in August 2015. The geocachers of New South Wales, for their part, came back in January 2014 and again in January 2024 to celebrate ten and twenty years of the idea; Lewis, unable to attend, had a note read out saying how proud he was of what he had added to the game.