So I spent last post enumerating the flaws of geocaching. But what’s the point of making complaints if you can’t/don’t offer solutions? Problem is that I can’t do anything about the economy. Can’t do anything about the fickle nature of people, either. And, until I have the power, reach, and wealth of Google, BookFace, and Amazon, I have no hope of ending other games and hobbies. But the last one? I may have a solution to it. I think by fixing a different problem we can do something about the quality and saturation question.
There’s a cache here in Austin where the (original) placer notes that he saw this new cache type in California and thought it would be good to drop some here. It’s a lamppost cache and he placed it in 2003. There’s a mystery cache series placed around the Texas Capitol. Two of them, actually, each composed of 5 mystery caches, both different paths to the same end goal. None of these caches have been completed in over a year because too many of them have had their solution locations lost. There’s a fifty cache series running from Round Rock to Bastrop. The series was placed 8 years ago, about a quarter of them are archived, and the owner hasn’t found a cache in over a year. I’m talking about…
Zombie Caches.
There are a lot of caches out there that seem to have been abandoned but are still around. They get logs replaced by cachers-through, but they sit waiting, uncared for. And there are a lot of them. A whole hell of a lot of them. Problem is that these take up valuable hiding space and make it harder for new hides. So I think that one of the best things that could happen would be to have a cache accounting. Have all caches get updated/maintained by their owners. Anything that doesn’t get updated gets archived. This would also be a great time to make a change to the distance stricture from .1 to .2 miles. Why go through all this? Two reasons: new cachers will get places to place, giving them more interest in and reason to stay with caching, and it’ll give old cachers new chances to place (hopefully) better quality caches, (hopefully) reinvigorating interests.
So, am I wrong? Why? Do you concur? Do you have better ideas? Let’s hear ’em!
Geocaching While Black 