We're still caching, and we're still enjoying it as much as ever, even after ten years.. But we've become much more selective about the kinds of caches we go after. I don't think it's dying, I think it's just become fragmented in a number of ways: geographically, for one, how the caching communities communicate internally and externally is another, and perhaps most significantly, there is fragmentation in terms of what cachers see as their goals. For many, it's become a numbers game, and I think it's a tribute to geocaching that it's been able to adapt to accommodate that. And all the other ways to play that have evolved over the years. For us, though, it's still and always has been about location. We want to cache someplace that's beautiful or interesting or unusual, and we don't want finding the cache to be a vision test when we get there, because our aging eyes will most likely flunk that test and spoil the fun.

Brian, I can also agree with you from experience that trying (or being forced) to take geocaching from the world of recreation to the world of business and lawyers will definitely, as you put it, suck the joy out of it. Someone in one of these recent posts mentioned Halloween Radioactive... I almost became physically ill seeing those two words in print again. Those were the years when caching took over our lives, while at the same time we did next to no caching.

Just Hike once referred to us as "old school cachers", and we took that title with pride. We can't wait until next weekend so we can go out caching again -- our way.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Brian Cluff brian-at-snaptek.com |Geocaching-AZ/Sneak1.0 Allow| <4ljlb6dntt@sneakemail.com> wrote:

I personally haven't been out in quite a while. The cachers that I run into all tell me that they aren't looking for caches anymore, though some say they still go to some of the get together events to hang out with friends.

I know for me the joy was sucked out of it when the lawyers for geocaching.com contacted us to tell us to take down functionality that we had created and they had copied..

This discussion list has also died. It used to get a couple dozen messages a day in its heyday, now we get about a message a month.

Are people still caching? It seems like it became a dying/dead fad from where I sit.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek
AzGeocaching.com
____________________________________________________________
Az-Geocaching mailing list listserv@azgeocaching.com
To edit your setting, subscribe or unsubscribe visit:
http://listserv.azgeocaching.com/mailman/listinfo/az-geocaching

Arizona's Geocaching Resource
http://www.azgeocaching.com