Two recent posts, one concerning geocaching etiquette and another
relating an incident where the cache seeker felt that a cache was placed
in an unsuitable location, have rekindled a general concern for the sport
that I've had since I first learned about it.
Geocaching is a very new activity for me so I haven't seen public
discussions of it until the last few weeks. If the subject of this post
has been beaten up in the past then I apologize, but would like to have a
brief summary of where folks stand. If not, then this may start or
continue a needed discussion.
Geocaching is still a small, low impact sport. I believe its been less
than two years since the GPS was given the precision to allow finding a
location to within 10-20 feet. Presently there are over 250 caches in
Arizona and growing steadily. Its not inconceivable that we could grow
exponentially for some time. If we double each year for only seven years
there will be over thirty thousand caches in the state. This obviously
seems impossible at present but my point is that given the potential of
the sport, it could easily grow much larger than we now experience. Now
is the time to be proactive about discussing possible future effects on
public lands and placing some rules to prevent problems with Forest
Service, BLM, state land and urban park managers, not to mention the
moral issue of protecting our environment in general.
Topics may include policies for placing caches in designated wilderness
areas (there should be none is the obvious answer for me) and removing
caches or not placing them at all in fragile and/or high use conditions.
There might come a time when we are so large that a limit should be
imposed on the life span of a cache before it should be removed, or an
upper limit on the number of caches placed within a given area, etc. In
general, we need to keep this sport as the pleasurable while still land
friendly activity it now enjoys.
Again, if all this is reinventing the wheel and such policies have
already been put in place, let me know where I can find them.
I'll stop here and add further opinions when I see where this thread
goes. My guess is that the majority, if not all of us, appreciate the
natural areas of Arizona enough that we place our sport second to
protection of the locations that are already often too negatively
impacted by other forces.
Jerry Nelson
Offtrail
(text/plain)