Favorite Caches in Utah

I took the time to play in Excel, and I sorted out the favorite 60 caches in Utah.  I was happy to see that at the moment I had 14 caches that had a favorite point.  It cheered me up to think that someone liked my caches enough to list them as a favorites.  Next spring will be two years and some will need an overhaul for the upcoming year.

The list does no have any multicaches, wherigos, webcams, or letterboxes.  There were none in the top 60 that were listed, so though some have points.. they did not come up on my list.   Next time I may go to the top 100.  That should add a few more.

I will update this periodically and see what the changes are.

Related Pages

Favorites in Utah

Oldest Active Geocaches Worldwide

99 Oldest Caches in Utah

Hiding a placing a cache & happy holidays

Here is a Happy Holidays from Groundspeak

Opencaching.com opens doors.

Well after all this time, the door is finally open to the website.  This is very patchy blog entry, most of it is rambling thoughts of skimming through the sites.

I sat down and started to look through again, after my first run through their system a month ago.

Here are my reactions.

Tons of dead links.  I ran into a lot of dead ends.  Some of my pages seemed to freeze.  I could not get anywhere until I started over with the main page.

There was no verification when i joined, and when firennice was taken, it assigned me (without asking) the FIRENNICE150 handle.  Apparently lower case has not been figured out at Garmin.

I took the time to enter the cache that I owned.  There are only three cache types traditional, puzzle, and multi.  So if you were hoping for something else then good luck.  It went in ok, and it calculated the initial "awesomeness" of the cache for me. 

There was no review.  I repeat  there was no review. That surprised me.  Most know that a lot of caches are never listed, and many others are asked to modify them.  I get one cache a week that is in the middle of the ocean, others in wilderness area.  There apparently is no checking,.  I also get a few dozen "update coordinate" notices here in Utah every week, but I don't see that ability here.

The guidelines are odd... very odd.

Under Rules and etiquette.

The real rules here...Family Friendly, no digging, or trespassing.

Under how to hide they add.

Seek permission, saturation (.1 miles) , avoid places that set off alarms, keep others save  

"Don’t hide your caches on cliffs, down abandoned mines, in trenches or anywhere that might put the safety of geocachers in peril."

As a cache owner there does not appear to be a way to delete my cache, or disable it?   Apparently it is there forever. Unless I cannot see it.  No one has logged anything.  But there are no controls that I see to delete bogus logs, or entries.   So who knows?

Searching was sporadic.  But with imfrog2002 and mine the only two in Utah there were no options.

You can import your finds, and your caches. So your info tracks

I could not get the link that report a cache that is against the guidelines to work. 

Summary

This is beta, I hope.  Messy, and many things that seem to be a future issue.  I do think that opencaching.us is better at the moment, but the other cache site is cleaner, and better to use, and it has more cache options.

Deleting my caches and logs on my caches seems bad, tracking me on two sites?  how does it interact between the two?  (more on those thoughts later).

I don't see anything appealing.  With cache rating coming on GC.com soon, there is nothing that would draw me over to the site.  I will keep playing to see what I get.  

No review and check of new members opens it up to attack.  Spamming the site with fake caches, grabbing caching names.  I wish i could keep the same name, but apparently I cant.

It does work to transfer info between the two sites.

Geocaching, Opencaching, other sites and the future.

So we are apparently moving towards the arrival of a new site.  I had a few ideas about the site.

I only believe there is room for one site that you pay for.  Would I drop geocaching.com for another?  No.  Would I pay for another site?  No.  It would have to be substantially better then the geocaching site and I don't see that happening.   I also have invested a lot into this site, and the phone apps that work with it.

The battle of the free sites.   I have not seen much in the free arena for a while.  Navicaching, and Terracaching seem to be languishing.  At least here in Utah.  I counted 40 caches for Terracaching and 100 for Navicaching.  Many are listed on all three sites, and many are in hard to reach locations.    Because I tend to geoaching alone these are out of the question.   My wife would kill me if I died in the back country geocaching.  I am serious she would hunt down my ghost and kill it again and again, and say "I told you to never go alone." 

Opencaching.us is the newest kid on the block, and is another novelty at the moment.  Yet also seems slow out of the gate.  Well at the same rate as geocaching was at first.  In a few months they have garnered about 350 caches.  Slow going but still to early to know if they can be as successful as the other two.

I actually think there are three ways that a website can survive, and thrive.   In today's market you need money.  So your site either needs to make money off of advertising, ask you to pay, or dump money into it. 

Paid memberships.. Geocaching and Terracaching

Advertising - the original Opencaching and Navicaching

The money dump - Garmins opencaching.com

So I dont see a contest between Geocaching and Terracaching. There is not enough caches to realy make me work at terracaching.

Advertising and selling products (t-shirts, hats, etc) is a hard haul.  If you are not the big boy on the block your advertising income is pretty low.

Dumping money.  Apparently this is free. I saw no hint of how they intend to make money off the product.  Advertising could be there.  Would Garmin allow Delorme and Magellan to advertise?  Would they even want to?  My guess is no, unless there was no other game in town.  They may want to use it to pimp their own products. 

The hard part is that it costs money to run a site.  Programming, so it looks professional and up to date; bandwidth; product development; advertisements; all of them start to add up. Some strike an equilibrium.  Many of the sites listed above do not have a full time staff, or even a part time staff.  It is all volunteers working on their own time.  They try to find that balance where the costs and the income meet.  Updates are put off because of lack of time or money, upgrades consist of new cache types, or maps, and advertising is zero because the money is not there.

If a company is not making money?  Why is it around?  How many advertising campaigns last five years?  One or two years is unusual now days.   That is my concern with the opencaching.com.  If Garmin is dumping money to keep it up to date, how long will that last.  If there is no income it will fade.  Eventually a change in corporate leadership and someone says.  "Why are we dumping a half million dollars into this again?"

Advertising?  I know many geocachers that have said they may be nearing a point to look for a new gps unit. The other (non-Garmin) units are getting better, and are made for geocaching.  If Garmin stabs us in the back why stay with them?  Only time can tell. Hopefully their customer service for the website is better than the service for their products or they are in trouble.

Are there benefits? Of course.  There are those that will have another outlet.  Some are never happy with the way things go and like to have other options.  Competition means more innovation, and faster changes in the market.  New ideas will pop up and people will move them into the market faster.   Customer service becomes more important.

Do I worry about the future, no.   I do not think it is in the cards for opencaching to take down geocaching.  If it is free and intends to be a free service, I do not think they can make money in a corporate environment that will keep it alive for 10+ years.   If they become a paid site, what is the advantage over the existing service? 

My prediction with only having had a cursory look of the site:  It will be the most successful of the non Geocaching.com sites.   I see many that are disgruntled going over there, and people that want to protect their cache sites cross listing their caches.  I do not see a group where caching is a side venture to sell gps being more successful than a group thats living depends on success.  

Just my 2 cents from the porch.



Opencaching - Views from others about a new site

I have been contacting a few of the other helpers and operators of other websites. To get their thoughts on the new opencaching site. 

In speaking with DudlyGrunt that spends time working over at the Opencaching.us site.  He is a member of almost all of the geocaching websites, a proponent of competition, and open to the idea of a new website.

I asked him his thoughts about them taking up the opencaching name.

  Well, that domain does seem to go back to a failed attempt to launch a new site back in 2003, 2 years before opencaching.de started the current OpenCaching community of sites.  However, using this name now would seem to only lead to confusion, unless their intent is to work with the current OC community and perhaps serve as some sort of portal.  However, as far as I know, they've not been in touch with the other OpenCaching sites, so far.

In trying to get a comments from the operator of opencaching.de he sent the following

At this time we will wait for a dialog between Garmin and the opencaching-network.

I think, it is the right way and not to force more public statements before a dialog has taken place.

He is hopefully awaiting contact between garmin and their sites before making comments.

Navicaching's PC Medic responded with the following

if Garmin is to use that name then I would hope it is just that.... OPEN caching.
Unfortunately I can see a possibility that it will become restricted to Garmin device owners only and even possibly on a subscription only basis, but I have no inside knowledge so am only guessing at this point. It would be a shame were that the case as I think one pay-to play site is enough. If they keep the "Your caches , Your Devices, Your Community" attitude it may be all good.

Both people were intent on the open database idea.  So we will see what happens on the front.  What I saw on their site made it easy to get your data in, but getting data out may be limited, such as a limited pocket query, or a one by one pick of the caches. 

I wish that I had more time to play on the site to answer more questions before they locked everyone out.

As I have mentioned a few times, I am not at all convinced that multiple sites are really a good idea.   I am not keen on there being a possibility of four caches all in the same 20' grove of trees, however having some alternatives is a good thing.  Competition can spur faster changes and reactions.  It can also filter ideas through multiple services.   There are also geocachers that get frustrated with reviewers or local players.  Multiple sites allow people to go to other sites to play with geocaching if they really enjoy it.  

No one really has an idea on how Garmin makes it financially feasible.  Of the people that I have talked with most have said that this makes them seriously look at other models.  If Garmin does not want to promote Geocaching.com then maybe they should look at other models.  More and more companies are making models that are designed with geocaching in mind and not as an afterthought. 

I asked a few others what their thoughts are, and send for information from the media contacts from three of four companies (including Garmin). We will see if anyone responds.  I will also have more from those that responded in future blogs.

If you have any comments you want to make feel free to post here, or email me with the contact section on the lower left.