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Geocaching Philosophy

Not a picky cacher

Caching in all of its flavors is fun for me. I enjoy the camo, the hike, the bike, the cache-n-dash, the puzzle and the straight numbers run. Every smiley is some place I have been, not just been through, and that’s cool. Truly.  If there’s a way to get hurt, chased, accosted, arrested, wet, broken or otherwise molested during a caching run I will find it.  Actually, it’s you people who hide these things that bring me to the pain. 😉

I really do enjoy it all and find myself in equally good company with both the easy going distance hiker and the tweaked out numbers runner.

Improve the game by playing it

Just because I have fun with it all should not imply I have no standards.  Sometime in Sept-Oct, 2008 I got a number of notes simultaneously from fellow North San Diego County Cachers regarding this crazy guy, CoolCache.  Read his profile, log a few of his hides and chuckle.  I wrote CoolCache himself and we had a good chat. I’m stealing his coined phrases “HQC” and “LQC”. From his own words:

“LQC= low quality cacher. The type of cacher who misplaces/breaks/abuses caches w/o telling you, does unfair trades, writes purely cut n’ paste logs, loses/steals TBs, contributes little to the sport but criticizes much, sometimes is jealous of others’ success (unbelievable I know), and generally is inconsiderate. HQC= high quality cacher. Just the opposite.”

That, in a nutshell, is it.  You can play this game for the education, the exercise, the bragging rights or all of the above, but at the end of the day you’re just signing scraps of paper and trading cheap swag.  Why not try to make it decent cheap swag and scraps of paper that aren’t wet?  How about safe and creative hides that have a point?  What say we stop stealing coins and TBs and pick up some trash on the way out instead?

Stop the slide past mediocrity- and speak up

I have a private sidebar with a few close Geocaching friends on occasion about local hides, hiders, techniques, logs or just whatever the hell we want to bitch about.  It’s usually obvious from our logs when things are right with the world, and a cache, but we try to keep the negative stuff between us.  There’s no sense in poisoning the well with our half-baked snark.

That doesn’t mean I lack a public opinion.  I really wish people would stop spamming, hiding crap containers and generally doing everything they can to create Geo-trash.  Every kind of hide, from the urban to the mountaintop, can be creative and fun.  Most folks aren’t out to create fun, just another hide.  For a small sliver of the Geocaching population that defines fun but I’m not sure just how much of the community that sliver represents.

For me, the solution was this blog.  I can communicate with other cachers and share the techniques/tactics that maximize our combined interest in the game, improve the local surroundings and generally contribute to a positive experience for new and old cachers alike.