Mike's First

The Mike's First geocache (GC4) lives up to its name: it is the first one placed by the world's first geocacher. On 6 May 2000, Mike Teague, from Vancouver in Washington State, had been the first to find the bucket Dave Ulmer had just buried in Oregon, the founding act of the game. The next day, he hid his own on the slopes of Mount St. Helens.

As early as 8 May, he copied onto his personal page the coordinates posted on the sci.geo.satellite-nav forum: this GPS Stash Hunt Homepage is the first list of caches in the world, and the word geocaching does not exist yet. In September 2000, Jeremy Irish opened geocaching.com and handed the list over to it. Teague bowed out on his page, which a geocacher copied in order to save it: "we finally have a REAL site", where Jeremy would do "a GREAT job".

Mike's First has been found only once, by Jeremy Irish himself, on 27 August 2000, a week before geocaching.com opened: he thought it too easy, a few metres from a busy camping pitch. In January 2001, the next visitor stood on the coordinates without finding anything, apart from a few scattered objects.