TITLE: Fewer geocaches
DATE: 2019-05-20
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I’ve been on a small spree of geocaching recently, both in the UK
during a two day residential training course for my PhD and also in
New Mexico while I was on holiday. In New Mexico I came across a
particular string of geocaches placed along the length of a road.
This was my first power trail, exciting!

The first cache of the trail is [20 ON 217-1] (GC5C3XQ), and there
are 20 more, hence the name. I logged the first cache of the trail
as I wanted to see what a power trail was like, but I wasn’t
impressed. The cache wasn’t hidden as such, just a plastic tube
inside a partially buried piece of pipe on the grass verge. The
cache wasn’t that well maintained and it looked like many people had
been doing a thing called a “throwdown” where they don’t even sign
the cache log, they just throw a little container or piece of
laminated card with their handle on it near the cache. In my mind
this is littering and shouldn’t warrant a Find. The experience of
standing at the side of a busy road getting blasted by traffic
doesn’t appeal to me. The other thing I don’t understand about this
trail on this particular uninteresting stretch of road is that there
is another power trail set up by another cacher just to the south on
the same road, this time with 40 caches ([40 ON 217-1], GC4MBZH).
In my mind this second power trail shouldn’t have got past the
community moderators.

  [20 ON 217-1]: https://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GC5C3XQ&title=
  [40 ON 217-1]: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC4MBZH

These power trails along the sides of roads exemplify what I think
is a problem in geocaching, where success is based on the number of
caches hidden and found rather than the quality of those caches or
the journey involved in finding them. When I go out on a walk or I’m
exploring a new place, I find having all these uninteresting side of
the road caches makes it difficult for me to locate good caches,
which leads to me not finding any caches at all, as I can’t be
bothered to sift through the low effort caches. I would much prefer
it if each cache was placed according to the significance of its
location, whether that’s along a hiking trail or at a particular
landmark in the city. Bearing in mind that a “landmark” doesn’t have
to be a statue in a public place, it could be a bench that has
personal significance, or a viewpoint in a park. Just something to
make the cache significant and interesting. Having a high density of
low effort caches every 100 m along a trail completely ruins the
experience of searching for the cache. With the power trails, if I’m
not motivated to get all the caches, I’m not going to look for any
of them as they’re uninteresting by nature when cached in isolation.

I understand that other cachers like the endurance challenge of
finding a load of caches all in one day, but I think that mentality
encourages other unsavoury habits like armchair logging and
throwdowns, as cachers attempty to boost their find count while
minimising the effort put in. I imagine it also leads to those
cachers becoming impatient when it comes to searching for a cache,
which I think must make the whole thing into a competition, with
lots of negative feelings surrounding it.

I searched around on the internet for a while to see if anybody else
had expressed feelings about wanting fewer geocaches, or caches of
better quality, but I couldn’t find anything beyond a few forum
posts about wanting cache hiders to maintain their many caches
better, something I think could be tackled if power trails were
discouraged. I could start ‘The Campaign for Fewer Geocaches’.

Alternatively, letterboxing is something I’ve been learning more
about. There are a lot fewer letterboxes and they are less visible
to normal folks, with the network being much more off the grid.
Because of their lower density and more enthusiastic community, I
think they’re generally better maintained.