Geocaching Peeve

Of the 61 caches that are within 9 miles of my home, 36 of them are micros. Several of those are basically film containers hidden in bushes long the edges of busy highways (with no parking except on private land), and then several others are also film containers hidden in places that much bigger trading caches could go.

This is extremely irritating to me because 1. Geocaching.com won't seem to do anything about it 2. With a stupid film container in every park we have (and we don't have many), it keeps others from putting in trading caches. One local cacher in particular owns 90% of the above mentioned caches. He/she put them all out mostly in one week or two this summer and basically cut off all placement of trading caches to the rest of the community. Geocaching.com has a policy that you can't put caches, or even segments to multi caches within 600 feet of another cache.

It is funny to me that Geocaching.com stopped allowing the placement of virtual caches (which I loved) because they thought it took away from the real caching spirit. Now that we can't place regular caches in National Parks or any land under USFS control, it seems that virtual caches were the way to go....there are whole areas of Yosemite that I might not have seen if it weren't for virtuals in that park. Unfortunately, those are all grandfathered caches, and no new virtuals can be placed anywhere (they will claim that their new site waymarking.com is the answer to this, but it is so random and unorganized that I don't think it will get used much).

Anyhow, I think micros that are hidden in places that trading caches could go are just terrible and also take away from the caching spirit. It just shows that the owner has no imagination and is not willing to put some money and time into their caches. It also increases the amount of damage that is done by searchers because they are looking for such a small thing in such a big area.

Now as a premium member, I can ignore the lame ass boring (oh I didn't mention that in most cases, there is nothing of interest on the cache page and there is nothing to see when you get to the site) micros, but that doesn't help me at all when it comes to placing new and exciting caches, which I might be willing to do if there were any public areas left to put them in. I also hate the fact that this has basically turned me off of micros completely, and I have had some micros in my past that were pretty cool.

The only fortunate thing is that it seems the local cacher listed above must live near me because as soon as I get more than 12 miles from home, their micros are no where to be found....can we say, amen to that.