Long-time TUAW readers know that I’m a fan of geocaching, and that I wrote a post about using the iPhone 3G for geocaching back in July. At the time, there were no true geocaching apps available for the iPhone 3G, so I talked about how to use the software that comes on the phone to find hidden caches.

Since July, a number of apps have appeared (Geopher Lite and iGeocacher to name a couple), but I’ve been holding out for one from Groundspeak, the folks who first started up Geocaching.com back in 2000. While listening to my favorite podcast, Podcacher, this morning, I heard co-host Sonny talking about the upcoming release of the “official” geocaching iPhone app. When I returned home from a walk I was tracking with TrailGuru, I visited Geocaching.com and read the details in their online forums.

The app has been submitted to the App Store, will cost US$9.99, and will initially allow iPhone owners to find caches near them, look up trackable items like travel bugs, save cache information for use when outside of phone network range, and limit results to save bandwidth. The next version will provide the capability to log found caches while in the field.