[Az-Geocaching] National Forests

[Brian Cluff]

Richard Pinnell wrote:
> geocaching. In other words, I can tell my friends that he/she should 
> hike to this really cool, off-trail location that I found in a National 
> Forest, but if it's posted on a website as a geocache then it's against 
> the rules. Either way there is a possibility of a new trail being 

That was one confusing thing about when I picked up our cache, I asked 
why they were being taken and he just mentioned the abandoned property 
rule that they have.  When I mentioned, "we turned the cache into a 
virtual cache so that people would still go there, they just would be 
about to actually find anything and sign the log book.  He seems to 
think that was a great idea.  So it seems that it's just a littering 
problem.... just litter you can't find, see, or get to easily.

The other thing he mentioned was the the popularity of geocaching is 
growing, which is very true, but I think they are thinking that it's 
going to get more and more popular until there is a steady stream of 
visitors to the cache, and therefore a trail to the cache.
But, with a little research you can see that most cache have a surge of 
people right at the beginning and then it seems to level off to a steady 
rate.
The cache we had confiscated (GC17F) is a perfect example since it was 
one of the oldest caches in arizona (12th cache).   If you look at the 
graph of visitors, you can see that in the summer there is almost no 
finds  on it, but if you look at the slope of when there ARE finds, it 
stays pretty much at the same angle today as it did 2 years ago when we 
first placed it, on average just over 1 person/team a month, going to 
find it. That hardly seems like enough people to even start to form a 
trail.  With that amount of time, even the footprints immediatly around 
the cache would be extremely faded, if visible at all.
I think they fail to realize 2 things.  With growing popularity, there 
are a growing number of caches, and that even though many many people 
have tried it, the actual number of cachers that cache on a regular 
basis (based on how many teams have found over 5 caches) are still in 
the mid to high 100's.  Or you can look at:
http://www.azgeocaching.com/misc_graphs.html
and see that the highest cache activity we have ever had was this month 
with 613 finds/not-founds, at this current rate, that 1/2 find per month 
per cache, and the urban caches are going to be taking up most of those 
finds.

Is the environment in danger from us....  The numbers sure say no.

I think we need to get an exception in for geocaching, so that they 
won't be considered abandoned property.  The ranchers that leave their 
cattle on the land don't seem to get them confiscated for abandoning them.
(Maybe we should start to refer to cache as cows.  That way we can have 
statements like "I tried to pet that nice cow you were telling me about, 
but I couldn't find it.", or "Found the cow, it's in great condition, 
but the pencil inside of it needs sharpening.")

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek