Geocaching Gold

It is very easy to be a critic. Finding faults and points of conflict really isn’t hard for most people. I know I’ve done my fair share of nitpicking and complaining, especially when it comes to lackluster geocaching challenges, often placed by the inexperienced, yet well-intentioned on behalf of tourism groups. 

After the misery that was our spontaneous attempt at the Route 39 Geotrail, bitmapped and I decided it was the last time we accepted poorly composted geotrails without being a force for good in the geocaching community. With over a month of planning, last night we filed as a limited liability company in West Virginia. Now, well-intentioned tourism groups have at least one place to go to get a higher level of geocache challenge designed and placed.

It’s not impossible or even all that challenging to place a meaningful and fun geotrail or geocaching challenge. More than anything, it involves an attention to detail and understanding of what geocachers expect if they’re coming from a long distance to complete your trail or challenge. Some of these skills are developed only by accruing geocaching experience, which happens after you find hundreds and even thousands of geocaches.

But it is true that everyone had to start somewhere. This is why I normally recommend someone find several caches, at least 25 to 50 before they think about hiding a geocache. In most communities in the US and Canada, that’s not a very difficult task to accomplish. But you’ll soon learn that no one will want to travel hundreds of miles to find a pill bottle under a lamppost skirt at a Walmart, but they may be more willing if it is the parking lot of the visitor’s center for a local point of interest.

While many geocaches pop up in uninspiring locations, those that showcase one of the reasons your little part of this world is special are gold. When I look back at my own favorite list, most of the caches make the list because of the place they took me. The second most common reason for caches to make the cut are unique containers or retrieval mechanisms. These are guiding principles in our placement of geocaches and will be for our future clients.