This week's important public message from Groundspeak
July 13 2011
Quality Geocaches
In 11 years, geocaching has grown from a single container in the woods of Oregon to an international activity with over 5 million participants and more than 1.4 million geocaches. In the last week alone, Groundspeak Volunteer Reviewers approved nearly 6000 caches. Wow. Thanks, Reviewers!This rapid growth means that almost anywhere in the world, you can walk out your door and find a geocache within an hour. But it also means that geocache saturation is increasing. In some areas, it is becoming difficult to find a location to place a cache.
As the number of geocachers and geocaches grows, we encourage you to make sure that each and every cache you place is of good quality. We know that everyone has a different opinion as to what makes a "quality hide," but there are some steps that you can take to make sure that others will enjoy your cache:
- Find many caches before hiding one of your own. This will show you how vastly different geocaches can be. We suggest finding at least 20-25.
- Think about your favorite geocaches and why you enjoyed them so much. Was it the location? The container? The story on the cache page? Try to replicate the elements that you enjoyed while adding some of your own creativity.
- Make sure that the geocache container is waterproof and will survive the elements. It is better to use a sealed container rather than a plastic bag.
- Maintain your geocache. This means replacing the logbook when it is full, checking on the cache every so often to see that it's still doing well and responding quickly to "needs maintenance" logs.
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