Geocache ownership is more satisfying then Munzee ownership

I planted a few munzees and geocaches lately.

Here are comments received on 3 new caches placed this week:

The captured munzees I placed in the same area - no comments. Which suggests to me that munzees are generally not exciting for finders. Geocaching is the meal, Munzee is the popcorn snack.  It seems that it's easier to comment on the quality and flavour of the steak but tedious to write something about each piece of popcorn kernel consumed.  
 

It's getting hard to hide a gc.com geocache

For almost a year now I've been carrying around a cache - sandwich size Lock and Lock™ with logbook and swag. I've been looking for a good spot to hide it locally. A nice forest with good trails or an attractive spot somewhere.

3 times I've tried to submit, each time I've been turned down. Once because I was about 10m too close to a 5-year-old old cache. I forgot that I had it on my ignore list because it was a bring-a-ladder cache and required some strength to retrieve the cache. I went back to try to find another good largish hiding spot not too far from the trail but I just couldn't find anything I liked.

The next attempt about a month ago was about 20m too close to a 2-year-old rock pile hide with a number of DNFs and NMs.  I found it 2 years ago. The coords are way off (I had posted better coords but the CO didn't update them). For the last 2 years people have been leaving miffed comments about the coordinates and the rock pile problems. I contacted the reviewer hoping they would intervene and alert the owner that if they didn't want to maintain the cache there was someone interested in hiding a cache nearby. But the reviewer asked me to post an NA before s/he would proceed. In my experience active but slack owners do not take kindly to NAs. 

This week I couldn't believe how fortunate I was to find a new section of a local trail. Freshly blazed and no caches. I found a decent spot under a stump. Submitted the cache. Waited and 3 days later I get a friendly but disheartening email from the reviewer. Someone has put placeholders on this new trail. I may not be able to post my cache. He will contact the placeholder. I must wait for a remote chance that the spot may open up. Sigh.

This has never happened to me before. We've been planting/posting caches on geocaching.com since 2002 (over 40 cache hides) and have never been stymied. 

The cache also contains a Munzee. I could undeploy and redeploy elsewhere but this is the 3rd time I've undeployed and redeployed it. So yesterday I decided I would post the cache anyway, on Garmin's OpenCaching site. This is a huge leap for me.  I considered posting on opencaching.us too but they discourage cross-posting.  I'll see how the Garmin site goes. I don't expect many visits maybe a couple if the Munzeers are also cachers who don't care which site a cache is posted on. If I get lucky and the placeholder relinquishes the location I'll also have it posted on gc.com but for now it's my first cache listing on another cache site.
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Update:
 "I must wait for a remote chance that the spot may open up. Sigh."
The trail opened up! I ended up planting 2 along the trail and have received some very favourable comments. :)

I tried submitting the cache to opencaching.com but I think because this was my first posted cache on OC, my submission was scrutinized carefully and the reviewer thought my coordinates were off. They are fine. I used a Garmin 62s to get the lat/long and averaged until I got a 100% rating. I decided not to post it on OC.com.

I went back to the first forest where I was too close to an old 5 year old cache. I was going to plant a letterbox in that spot but only post it on AQ. Well I couldn't find the log. Too much vegetation covering the area in the springtime. I looked for another spot and found a decent hollow base of a tree. Sometimes visiting at different times of the year gives one a fresh perspective. And, it turns out this spot is far enough away from any geocache in that forest. It's been 5 years since the 2 older caches were placed so it'll give people who visited years ago another reason to go treasure hunting in this quiet old-growth forest.

Groundspeak Weekly Newsletter July 13 2011 - Quality Geocaches

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.

You can see which geocaches others recommend by looking at the number of Favorite Points that each cache has received. Favorite Points can be found on each cache page and in the search results list. Premium Members can award 1 Favorite Point for each 10 caches that they find and can sort the search results list by most-favorited caches.