Unfortunately, I sometimes find that my storytelling ability, or the story itself fails to convey my enthusiasm appropriately. More often than not, I am partially through describing one of my latest adventures when I notice that the interest level of my listener has diminished. The eyes glaze over, they just aren't getting my point. Or aren't interested in the activity. And that's fine.
There are also times, usually after a string of DNF's, or finding a number of less interesting "TFTC" type caches, that I question my own commitment to this activity. I have been far less active lately in finding geocaches. This has nothing to do with my enjoyment of it. I really do enjoy it. But I am finding that the quality of the (mostly urban) hides has diminished significantly in the past year or two. It seems that every cache I try to find within the city limits is either on, or ridiculously near, private property. Or it is undersized for the environment, or in a lousy, leaky container. But more than anything, it seems that quantity has taken the place of quality. Does there need to be a cache at every red-light camera? Every fire station? I think not. This lack of creativity sucks much of the enjoyment out of the sport for me. I'm not suggesting these caches shouldn't exist. Plenty of cachers find them and are happy for the numbers. I'm just saying that the game has changed, and I'm just not particularly fond of the direction it is headed. The spirit of geocaching is to find a container that holds trading items, coins, travel bugs as well as a logbook. Far too many urban hides contain a rolled up log strip and that is all. And they tend to be hidden in areas that can support a much larger container.
There seems to be much less consideration of the impact to the surrounding environment. The smaller the container, the more complex the search, and therefore the more damage to the surrounding area. There is also the issue of optics. People are not excited about strangers poking around in their back lanes, or along their fence line that backs on to a park space. I wish people would consider this when placing a cache. It's embarassing to be confronted by a nervous property owner because they think you're up to no good. And it does nothing to promote the sport as a fun family activity with a leaning towards environmental stewardship. Few kids enjoy finding nanos and micros with no chance of trading anything. And when you need to trample a patch of junipers or other greenery to find a film canister...well what's the point?
I left the city of Brandon after driving past 2 caches hidden on private property yesterday. I drove south on highway 10 with the intent to finally locate a cache I had been driving past for years: Grasshopper Glen. I had been told it was a beautiful area and well worth the search. The search itself once I got to the site was rather easy and the container was chock full of trading items. I look forward to bringing my family back here.
Getting to the site was a significant challenge for me due to not being familiar with the area. In the end, I was thankful for this because of the sights I saw, and the neat places I found. One such place was a network of horseback riding trails.
In one of my attempts to find the correct road in to the site I found this winding trail that led through a forest, and snaked down a steep hill. It was wide enough for the truck so I followed it. It opened up into this vast beautiful valley and a wide bend in the Souris river. It was just cold enough for the river to still have an insulating crust of ice. There was no wind at all. Not a breath. I turned off the engine, got out of the truck and looked around. I was in the middle of a valley that was about a kilometre wide. There was no apparent wildlife, although I suspect they were just out of sight, watching me as I made my way into their home and wandered around their living room.
The surrounding hills were high; at least by Manitoba standards. As I walked down to the edge of the water I was amazed at the deafening quiet. There was not a sound. As I mentioned, there was no wind to speak of, and this rendered the grounded leaves mute. At least until they were mashed under my feet as I walked. The surface ice offered no clue, audible or visual of the water that was rushing beneath it. I stood there for a very long time. It was like viewing a vast painting. The only noise that penetrated the silence was my own breathing. If I held my breath, I was completely overwhelmed by quiet.
It. Was. Awesome.
This story is why I love going geocaching. Even though the wrong trail led me no closer to the cache, it was that effort that made my entire day worthwhile. In the same amount of time it took me to find this one cache, I could have likely looked for 30 urban micros. But I guarantee that none of those finds would have inspiried me the way that this silent river valley did.
I think that it’s not that there are less good caches, there are just more uninteresting ones.
ReplyDeleteGeocaching in Manitoba is a victim of its own success. The very things that make geocaching so appealing, like being almost unconstrained and refreshingly free of advertising and agendas, are also its weaknesses. Anyone can hide a geocache. The enjoyment of the find is only limited by the creativity of the hider. There are still plenty of caches – even urban ones – where the hider has really tried to create something enjoyable. On the flip side, it’s all too easy to stick a miniscule container almost anywhere.
I think a cache needs to show you something interesting, take you on a fun journey, or stand on its own as a purely creative creation to appeal to the finder. That’s my cache grading system; a cache gets 0, 1, 2 or 3 points – and there are a lot of urban caches that get 0 points. That’ s just my opinion though, as there are also people who seem to enjoy looking for a watch battery in a pile of broken glass while being observed by passersby just for the challenge of finding it.
Geocaching has changed and it’s true that you can no longer assume that the cache you’re looking for will have any appeal at all. The onus is now more on the hunter to prepare and decide which of the 800 caches in Winnipeg might hold some charm. Spontaneity has been removed.
Hiders may need to face the fact that Winnipeg has reached cache saturation. More and more caches are being placed on private property and in locations where a cache has no business being.
Hiders: take a drive beyond the Perimeter, see the world, you’ll find all kinds of interesting locations worthy of your cache creation.
Some of the problems are also coordinate related. Just when GPSs were getting more and more accurate and you could expect accuracies in the 3-5 m range, the market was flooded with “smart phones”. More and more hiders are now using these devices to capture coordinates and lucky if they’re within a city block of the cache. That doesn’t make a cache “more challenging” it just has bad coordinates.
I’ll admit that the more creative caches often tend to be the ones requiring more maintenance. However, with some recon and careful planning and knowledge of what materials will last in Winnipeg and stay waterproof year round, a hider can create a pretty maintenance free container. Of course it also depends on it being so well hidden or cleverly disguised so as not to be muggled. Tricky. A watch battery stuck to the underside of a rusty piece of metal in a crack park is unlikely to be discovered and all it will need is diligent replace of the itsy bitsy and very annoying little coil of paper that is the log book. Having said that though, I could walk around with a pocket full of nano’s sticking them anywhere, but I’ll get much more enjoyment – and so will the hunters – from a cache that took me two recons and a placement after searching high and low for appropriate materials.
To hiders: ask yourself, “Why am I bringing someone here?” and if the answer is this is an “impulse hide” or “the area didn’t have any caches” or “I don’t know”, these are the wrong reasons. In the “old days” cache approvers wouldn’t let a newbie place a cache – they wanted to know that the hider had found quite a few caches first and hopefully gained some insight into what made an enjoyable cache. I think it’s still a good rule of thumb. That’s not to pick on newbies though, because cachers with 100’s finds can put out a boring cache too.