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Geocaching Crackdown?
thejuggler writes "Some cities and counties are banning or considering banning geocaching in their parks. "It's good, clean, wholesome fun - just do it someplace else," said Brian Adams, chief of resource protection for the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which has banned geocaching. The geocaching.com website claims there are over 600 caches within 100 miles of the twincities."
Naturally, the headline is a bit of an exaggeration of the article - only some parks are talking about banning it outright, and they do have a point - some of the material being left is unsuitable, large numbers of people traipsing to the same point causes erosion, etc. But if the caches are moved regularly, and only suitable material is left, then it wouldn't be a problem - except who would regulate it?
Have you even ever read the rules, or gone a cache for that matter? Caches do *not* get buried, just covered in leaves or sticks or stones - usually in ammo boxes or tupperware, something insanely difficult for wildlife to open if it found it. But then again, since the rules state no leaving food, wildlife is never a problem.
I have only been on 5 caches so far, but we have *never* left a trace that we were there, save for a prize exchage and a entry in the log book.
Your argument is insulting and just plain ignorant
I have geocached for a while now. It seems like it has changed though, and is attracting a much wider following. When I moved to the Charleston area two years ago, there were about 20 caches nearby. Now we have 243. With some many more people involved, it can create a lot of traffic. The best places for caches are off the beaten path where they are unlikely to be disturbed by people who may have ill-intentions. This is precisely where the traffic hurts the most. I haven't read the article yet, still can't get it to load, but as someone who loves spending times outdoors, I'm not sure where I stand on this. It's a fun hobby, but with too many people not being cautious about thier impact on the surroundings, it could be not that great for the park or area the cache is in.
-Michael
Doesn't this have to do with *saving* the parks? If someone slashdots a park (say, trampling nature areas), wouldn't it be nice to have a cache?
The cities should just list all their public litter bins as geocaches. That way, the geocachers can have their fun, there is nothing left lying around spoiling beauty spots, and if they're lucky, they won't have to empty their bins so often.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Robert Sime, a Richfield dad, takes his 4-year-old daughter out about twice a month. He said parks should adjust to what the public sees as legitimate use. "When volleyball came along, they all put in courts for that," he said.
This is one of the most insightful comments in the whole article. Instead of trying to fight the geocachers they should be helping them to establish the cache sites. The park would be able to create a more terrain friendly cache site, and in turn they would get more visitors.
Isn't this the kind of visitor you'd like in your park?
"Ninety percent of us pick up bottles and cans, whatever we find. It's part of the game," she said.
There's a type of cache that's becoming very popular, called a "virtual cache." Nothing is stored on the site, it's just a coordinate, and a clue as to what you're supposed to find there. I'd like to see them ban that. What are they going to do, ban GPS units?
There have been a few cases of serious damage caused by cachers. In one instance, a cache was placed within 10 feet of a teepee ring, which is considered a sensitive archaeological site. If you've seen how the ground gets trampled around a cache, you'd see how this could be a problem. I can certainly understand the park officers being upset that someone posted a "please trample the grass" sign on such a site.
I do think it's a BIT hypocritical though; the public parks are always aching to increase flow through the park to keep their budgets, but apparently they just want people to come in the gate, get the headcount, eat a picnic out of their trunk and leave. When those people start exploring, they get upset.
OTOH, I have seen geocachers that have no interest in exploring. They beeline straight to the coordinates, tramping anything in the way, do their logging, and tromp straight out. But many of us spend an afternoon checking out the trails while we're there, which is exactly why the parks are (supposed to be) there.
Maybe the former types of cachers should take up benchmark hunting instead.
Man I wish I had the points to mod you up. Does anyone read Geocaching.com? These parks folks do have a point about paths being worn to the caches. Moving them once a year would probably help prevent this. Also, putting them near a path or almost on a path would be good too. Also, photo caches are nice too (just take a pic of yourself and of the GPS at the cache.....) and up load it to the web. Geocaching reminds me a bit of ham radio. Everyone searching for a contact(the cache). Sometimes they are hard to find (rare DX). Sometimes not (chatting on a repeater...). If there are ANY Geocacher's that leave trash and mess up the area, I would be surprised. Geocaching has a ethos like camping. Campers regularly leave their stuff on the table and stuff at the site and almost noone steals there stuff (in 20+ years of camping, I have never had anything stolen in a campground). Campers also usually leave the area as good as or better then it was when they got there. Now same as with Camping, there are BAD apples. Just deal with it and let us use the park. Noone else does!
Gorkman
My dad and I both enjoy geocaching. In an effort to increase its popularity in our area, we have placed caches in local parks and other scenic places. One of our ideas was a multicache of all the Civil War forts in our county (there are 6). Two of them are on National Park land. We requested permission to place caches there, and after not hearing anything back for about a month, we placed the caches in inconspicuous areas in the parks. For a few months, we read logs of people who were really enjoying the caches and most of them remarked on how they never even knew about the sites before geocaching. Then things turned sour.
We started reading logs of people being harassed by park rangers. Some reported the park rangers about to arrest the geocachers for stepping off the path. We soon received an e-mail from a NPS official telling us that we were breaking the law by leaving the caches in the park. In the e-mail he specifically mentioned that geocachers dig up earth to find caches (all the caches were above ground) and that they tear up property and litter. None of these statements are true. We had to sneak in to get the caches back without getting arrested ourselves (apparently the park rangers were on the lookout for us).
How do you fight such ignorance? We sent back logs of people saying how much they enjoyed the areas and never knew of their existance before the caches were placed along with letters explaining the 'cache in, trash out' policy of geocaching, but to no avail. Any ideas where to go from here?
The article is heavily drama. I am a geocacher that knows two of the people mentioned in the article. When they say "Three park officials walk up. Will they kick him out? Not today," they're referring to Washington County Park Officials that not only allow geocaching, but promote it as well. Drama, Drama, Drama...
;-)
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Nola Cutts, mentioned in the article, said this:
"LOL -- You know what? I talked for the better part of an hour with this reporter about my philosophy of "leave no trace" and my "trash out" activities and the progress MnGCA [Minnesota Geocaching Association] was making with having people pick up garbage on the trails and how I thought geocaching was environmentally friendly in that regard..... You have all heard this from me before
Toward the end of the interview we were JOKING about how my husband hates to geocache and how I hate to fly fish. So what quote does he use, my speech about recycling or fly fishing? AAAAKKKKK!"
They chose to make an almost faticious battle between the parks and the unknown techno-nature-hippies instead of talking about how interesting Geocaching is, and not only that, but most Geocachers that I know of in the Twin Cities, and I know that most with the Minnesota Geocaching Association also help clean up city, county and state parks during caching trips. I'm dissapointed the article was even made, and even more so that it's on Slashdot!!!
The reporter failed to mention that the MN DNR is working on a plan for Geocaching in State Parks as well.
On a final note, that is my visi.com they found mentioned in the 2nd to last paragraph.
Reference URLs:
Thread about article with the MN Geocaching Association:
http://mngca.org/forum/viewtopic.ph
Thread about relations with MN DNR with the MN Geocaching Association:
http://mngca.org/forum/viewtopic.ph
Cache that was visited in the article:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_de
Ian Stevens' Geocaching Profile (King Boreas) - the main cacher in the article - also an interesting note that he has *placed* more caches than any other cacher:
http://www.geocaching.com/profile/defaul
-s4xton
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
There is a saying with geocachers called "Cache In - Trash Out". Basically, it means that whenever you go geocaching, you're supposed to leave the park better than when you came (ie. picking up trash). There is even a day for this.
I know some parks in my area that have become usuable because of this. This guy needs to get a clue and figure out that geocaching is not ruining parks.
Obviously spoken by someone who has no f'in idea what he's talking about.
Geocaches are not buried, just placed and usually covered with a few sticks. Properly placed, they are difficult to see unless you are looking straight at them, and even then they blend in. Most people use ammo boxes, or tupperware painted black or brown.
The rules state that the landscape is NOT to be disturbed, including when hunting, as much as possible. No food of any kind is to be in the cache, to avoid animals getting into them. Also, the "Cache in, trash out" campaign urges cachers to bring a bag and carry out trash that you see. My kids and I typically carry out one or two grocery bags of trash every trip. I've never seen ANY evidence that cachers have left any garbage; most of the stuff we find is the sort of thing that partying kids would dump.
That's what my last adventure was - finding the site of a WWII B25 bomber crash in the blue ridge mountains. I have hiked up that mountain many times, and /never/ realized that a debris field with airplane parts, rusty engines, prop hubs, etc were just a few hundred yards off the 'official' trail untill a geocacher pointed it out. They just don't tell you these things at the ranger station!
That was a rough hike.
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I'm not going to get too deep into this whole thing but I suspect if someone were to find an ammo box concealed under leaves or stone in a public park around here it wouldn't be long before the bomb squad boys were called in.
Yeah, it sounds like fun, but after terror attacks and sniper whackos, people are kindof twitchy around here.
Though I see your point and agree to it to some extent, places like the Petrified Forest are a special case. I for one think this "hand's off nature" attitude thats made it's way into popular thinking is foolish. In the long run it's actually self defeating, since insulating the public from experiencing it in a personal way leads to a lack of appreciation for it IMHO.
;-] ). Those memories, along with teaching from my parents to be responsible and not destructive gave me a great love and respect for nature. Things have changed drastically now, and not for the better.
I'm old enough to remember a time when you were allowed off the trails in most parks. I have many fond memories of exploring, discovering and having the thrill of just maybe getting lost in the woods (hey, I was a kid
Now every park is like going to a theme park. Stand in line here. Walk here. You can touch this but not that. God forbid that you TOUCH that tree or plant, you may hurt it! Don't you DARE feed that squirrel or bird, you're disrupting nature!
Uh, pardon me, but 90% of the time this is utter bulls**t. Granted you'll have your small share of idiots ruining things for everyone else, but shutting down access for the common man/woman/child is NOT the way to solve it. Even with limited access the fools still find ways to litter, destroy and generally ruin a beautiful location.
So what is the answer? Well, IMHO the more people are connected to a place the more they will care about it. Give people the education and reason to care and much of the policing will be handled by the public itself.
Case in point: there is still one metro park in my area that allows people to go off trail to a long stretch of river. This is by *far* the most litter-free area of park I've seen. Since the river is wide and shallow you consistently see people fishing, parents with kids walking the shallows looking for crawdads, and people in general just enjoying actually EXPERIENCING nature - not just staring at it from behind a fence or barrier. You also consistently see people walking the bank and riverbed picking up any litter they see, since they know that THEY might be the next one to step on that piece of broken glass or bottle cap. I've even seen a fisherman take some teenage kids to task for throwing their litter on the ground. He talked to them in a friendly way and they actually listened to him and picked up their trash, joking around with him.
I'm not saying just open everything up and let people do whatever they please in our parks, I'm just saying that this "hands off" way of thinking is getting too strong. Nature is not some delicate construct that will fall over and shatter at the least little nudge from big bad mankind. It's been my experience that most people I've spoken to that think this way have an inate dislike of mankind to one degree or another, whether they realize it or not.
I guess I am willing to conclude that if:
Every story on something I KNOW something about gets it wrong
...then it is fair to assume that MOST stories get it wrong MOST of the time. It isn't that I am cynical. I just don't think the media/journalists are in the business of telling the truth. They want to entertain. They want to sell. OK, well, noted. But if you want facts, you are aren't going to get them from a newspaper or channel 9.
(PS: You are in charge of visi.com?! Wow... Personal aside to Saxton(34078)
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I work on an air force base. One day a few months ago, I heard that traffic was backed up going out of one of the gates that is near a freeway overpass.
Someone had reported that a person had left a suspicious package near the overpass.
They closed the gate, called out the bomb squad, cavalry, etc., only to find that the suspicious package was a geocache.
So be careful where you place your geocache, consider who might be watching and what conclusions they might jump to.