shellbadger

In an earlier post, I uploaded a preliminary top-25 list of the oldest trackables. I asked readers to send ID numbers of trackables that might be included on the list and a few cachers did. In the meantime, I discovered a means to quickly screen the trackable lists of logged trackable of a few of my US and European correspondents. The screening that took me weeks before, could be completed in a few hours. In summary, I learned after sorting the lists by most recently-logged trackables, the first trackables for a given date listed are the oldest. I started with 14-Jan-24 and worked backwards to 6-Jan, when the screening was suspended so I could spend my time counting drops. Early It became clear that 15- and 14-year-olds were pretty common and I should restrict my search to trackables activated before 2006 to discover the oldest ones. The initial screen included over 70 trackables, but more than half of them had obviously included duplicate tags or proxies. I encounter two such examples that had accrued more than 22 years. There may well be others on the present list, but to winnow them further would require reading every log entry on 100-300 pages for every trackable. Although more than half the entries on the original table were replaced, the present table is absolutely not definitive. It is the gleanings from only five cachers having logged trackables active in early January 2024. While this is a meager sample, it is enough to satisfy my curiosity. I have no doubt that there are enough unknown trackables to displace most of those listed on the present effort. My oldest active trackables are over 13 years old. I started this project to determine how their age compared with others that may be out there. What I learned is they are at least eight years behind the active leaders and I will not live long enough to see any of them make a future leader board. The criteria for inclusion in the table are detailed earlier in this thread. However, I will clarify some points and make some observations. The ranking is based on age in years (the gold column), which involves calculating the difference in days between the release dates (green column) and the last logged date (the blue column). Days are then converted to years. Three decimal places were sometimes required to establish rank. The drops are counted exclusively from the map page of each trackable…it was the most time-consuming part of the project. The counts represent only a minimum number of drops or exchanges. Unlogged drops or exchanged usually cannot be identified. The drop number may also be interpreted as the number of cachers who have possessed a trackable. The values for age, drops and miles are current as of 19-Jan-24. Subsequent activity for any of the trackables can change the ranking. The trackables with last-dates in years 2022 or older, are likely missing will eventually fall out of any future rankings. Except for the itemized trackables following, the majority spent time in both North America and Europe, perhaps more the latter…Australia and New Zealand are also frequent destinations. Many of the Europe-based trackables had pilgrimages to Seattle. Number 5 was in Europe and the Middle East. No. 7 stayed in the USA except for a brief trip to Iceland. No. 9 was Europe only. No. 12, USA and Bermuda only. No. 21, USA only. No. 23, mostly Europe. No. 24, mostly USA. I am finished with this exercise, do not send any more candidates for evaluation.

I have your second one at 14.214 years. I will work it up later, it is is near midnight here, bedtime for this old man.

I will look at the second one, it might make the list for a while, depending on how many responses I get.. You are right fizzymagic's trackable might be untouchable (see attached).

Outstanding, and I see that is still active, I will work it up. Lucky indeed, I released over several hundred trackables during 2010-2011 and I have only a handful that have made it to 13 years.

That is my favorite modern warplane. Sadly that is not the only example of a trackable without photos on either the home pages or the galleries.

I didn't calculate age or drops on all the trackables. I had set up a spreadsheet to determine the days between the release and last log dates. After the first 40 or so, I established a top 25 after which it was just screening for anything older than rank 25. I would then call up a TB home page and if even the activation date was after 2009, I moved to the next one. The ones with earlier release dates required a little more scrutiny. I should add that, on the cacher profile page, Groundspeak sorts the the trackables logged into those that employ the travel bug dog tags and those that use the themed travel tags. Among the total trackables I have logged, only 40% were of the former but contributed the most trackables to the top 25.. The themed travel tags (60%) didn't become mainstream until around 2012 so they mostly didn't require much effort. That said, the Jeeps and Diabetes travel tags were among the very oldest trackables. Just send me the ID number, I will do the rest. Even if you did pull in the extra info, I would do it again to be sure everything on the list gets the same treatment.

I consulted my profile page, where Groundspeak lists links to all the trackables I have ever logged. I am a retired old man with time available, it took me about three weeks to put the data together. All but maybe three trackables were released long ago. Those in my possession now were retrieved recently and are already boxed and awaiting mailing to a friend in Scotland after the holidays. I do not collect or otherwise hang on to trackables.

The question of the oldest trackables gets raised periodically on the forum and readers will usually offer up examples, but with few details. As of the end of 2023, I have had 1,354 trackables belonging to someone else pass through my hands. I examined the logs for all of them and have compiled a list of the 25 oldest ones, with some details (see the table below). I have no illusion that any of these are the oldest trackables, but rather they are only the oldest among a relatively small sample…the table is just a point of reference from which to start. I would like readers to post the ID numbers of old trackables they own or have handled so I can update the list. However, there are rules. The trackable must be as originally released, I want no copy or proxy trackables unless that was what was originally released. If I see an owner’s name in later drops, that trackable is usually disallowed. The release date is not the activation date, it is the date the owner hands the trackable off or otherwise leaves it to its fate in a cache. A drop is fundamentally a release of possession, either by a drop into a container or by handoff to another cacher. The original release is not counted as a drop. As of 2024, the release date must be before 2009. If the release date is much before 2009, the trackable must be at least 14 years old on the last date logged. Those values will change with time and participation. The last date is the last logged date of either a drop, retrieval, grab or visit. Ignore terminal discover logs. I calculate the days between the release and last logs and convert the days to years (Yrs). The Drops are divided by years to arrive at the average drops per year (/Yr). Low /Yr values indicate long periods between drops, usually as held trackables or residence in remote or rarely visited containers. Also, larger or unusually-shaped trackables move at slower rates. Finally, I make no distinction between missing or active trackables. Some of the listed trackables have already been marked missing by the owners or cache administrators. However, based on records I maintain on my own trackables, I don’t regard a trackable as missing until a period of three years has elapsed since the last logged drop, retrieval, grab or visit. That is the point at which the probability of a trackable becoming active again is much less than 1%. The only listed trackable that satisfies this criterion is the one at rank 14.

Before they disappear, I want my trackables to be active, to travel and to be seen by many cachers as possible. Among the ways to measure trackable activity, I value drops achieved more than miles traveled, age or rate of travel. In my opinion, the totals of the latter three variables are too easily inflated by a single cacher, at no risk to the trackable. An example is the airline pilot’s trackable that accrued over a million miles, possibly going to many exotic locations, over many years…but the trackable was never released during that journey. It was a notable occurance to be sure, but what would have been really remarkable was for the same miles, locations and age to have been reached after a series of drops by many cachers. While I believe total drops is the best index of trackable activity, for those readers interested, I have also gathered and tabulated data for age achieved, miles traveled, and rate of travel. Below are four separate tables listing the top 15 performers for each of those parameters. The top 15 are the 0.567 percentile of each parameter (15 of 2,675 missing trackables). For each trackable listed, the tables also include the ID number, the trackable name, the release date, the release location, the last-log date, and the last log location. The three rightmost columns of the tables are the respective other activity values for the listed top performer. In the first line below the body of the table are the average values for the listed top performers. Under the release and last location columns are the respective percentages of the locations being in the United States versus elsewhere. I included all four tables in this post because I wanted to make some direct comparisons between the them. In later posts I may examine each of the tables more thoroughly. There was no trackable that appeared on all the top 15 lists. There were two trackables that appeared on three of the tables, the Flag or Canada TB (orange cells) and the State Flag of Texas TB (blue cells). There were two trackables that appeared on two tables, the Holly-Buddy Holly Center TB1b (yellow cells) and the Chip-Blue TB07 (green cells). On the basis of two firsts (drops and age) and a 14th place (miles) ranking, I declare the State Flag of Texas the top performer among my missing bugs. I should point out that I have released many Texas-themed trackables and very few of them have escaped the state. This one was the first released in Europe. There is a caveat. As I scanned the release dates in the tables, it occured to me how premature this designation top performers is. A total 85 percent of the trackables in the tables were released in the years 2010-13. I still have a few 2010-released trackables yet to go missing, and even more from subsequent years. Furthermore, I know I have trackables with more drops, miles and age and, when they go missing, they will supplant many trackables on the present tables. To establish a legitimate baseline, I must wait until all the trackables released in the first year or two are missing. That may be years in the future and, as I am 84 at this writing, I might not be able to see it done. Still, it was an interesting exercise. In the next post, premature or not, I will examine Table 01 in more detail.

There are probably many ways to express trackable activity, but I will use a combination of drops achieved, miles traveled, trackable age, and rate of travel calculated as drops per year. When possible, the averages for each of these variables for each location were calculated and displayed in the Location vs Activity table below. At the bottom of the table are the minimum and maximum values observed. The minimums are all zeros because trackables went missing from the cache into which they were released. Trackable TB2REBJ achieved 67 drops. It was released in Amsterdam, Netherlands in April, 2010 and went missing in December, 2019, in Wales, UK. It was also the oldest trackable at 9.66 years. The most miles traveled by one of my missing bugs (99,450) was by TB6QNHK. It was released near Flomot, Texas in July of 2015 and went missing in Tallinn, Estonia, in August of 2019, after 10 drops. None of these maximums are records as I have other active trackables, as well as have handled trackables belonging to others, that exceed all the values. Refer back to the body of the table. Obviously, no averages can be calculated for those locations having only a single value. Furthermore, I would not draw serious conclusions from locations having only a few last-logs. Thus, I prepared another table excluding all locations have fewer than five last logs. Then, I ranked the locations by the number of drops achieved (see the Ranked Activity table below). As is stated in earlier posts, the reader should not assume the location where the trackable went missing is where all the travel occurred. For example, at the top of the list, there are five trackables that went missing in Sweden, TB3EZPC, TB4085X, TB4Y401, TB6C9TN and TB6CGWZ. All were released in Texas and all spent time in Germany at some point. Belgium and the Netherlands were other prominent drop locations. Still other drop locations were variously Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland. None had their non-US travel confined to one country. The blue cells are the locations and numbers (in parentheses) of released trackables. In every instance except in Belgium and the US, there were net gains in trackable numbers over those released there. A large portion of the trackables released in Belgium were at a Mega attended by traveling cachers and those trackables quickly dispersed beyond that country's borders. The chief takeaway from scanning the rankings is that the missing trackables in the United States scored last in all four of the activity measurables (the orange cells). All locations but adjacent Canada averaged twice to five times the number of drops and miles achieved. It is nearly the same for the rate of movement (drops per year). As for the average trackable age when they went missing, in the US they lasted 1.31 years, whereas there are no locations elsewhere with average longevity at less than two years…there are six locations with averages over three years. I always notice where my trackables are, but where they end up is less important to me than their activity. That said, I have learned that where trackables go missing can reveal a quite a lot about their activity. These data suggest that, on average, trackables that remain in the US (or perhaps even get to the US) will be far less active, by any measure, than those that travel almost anywhere else. In the next post I will try to identify some of my best-performing trackables.

In the period 2010-19, a total of 2,675 of my trackables have gone missing. See Parts 01-03 of this series of posts for my definition of missing, as well as other background for the project. In this particular post I will detail where those trackables went missing, as indicated by the locations of the last-visited caches. The table below is first a listing of the locations where at least one of my trackables went missing (the leftmost two columns). There are 49 “countries” within the borders of which was the last cache visited by one of my missing trackables. The countries are listed in alphabetical order. The rightmost eight columns of the table are the counts and locations where those same trackables were released. The column headings for the release locations are the standard three-letter abbreviations for the countries, where USA stands for the United States, GRB for the United Kingdom, BEL for Belgium, FRA for France, CHE for Switzerland, NLD for the Netherlands, ITA for Italy and CAN for Canada. The letter n is the number or count for each location. The table is read as follows. For the first entry, a total of 22 of my trackables went missing in Australia, 18 of which were released in the United States, while two were released in the United Kingdom and two others were released in Belgium. For the last entry, 2,245 went missing in the US, of which 2,240 were released here, while two were released in the UK, two were released in Belgium and one was released in Canada. Some of the islands listed among the last-locations are protectorates of larger nations. They are segregated because their isolation gives them travel status in my eyes…but maybe I just like having the Isle of Man and tiny Saint Martin on the list. Regarding the latter, I could just as well have substituted the name Sint Maarten since the trackable disappeared from a cache at the monument marking the boundary between the Dutch and French partitions of the island. Most of the islands are in the Caribbean and West Indies. The Seychelles are in the Indian Ocean. By far, most of the countries are in Europe, but there is also lesser representation from Asia, Africa and South America. Canada and Mexico are the other representative countries from North America. Australia and New Zealand have surprisingly high counts, considering the distance to travel to those countries. While the vicarious traveler in me is pleased by the wide geographic distribution of my trackables, the fact remains that this list is comprised of the locations for missing trackables. Sadly, 2,245 (84%) of the total of 2,675 went missing in the US, where most were released. And, as will be shown in a later post, most of those losses were in Texas, again, where most were released. The reader should not assume that the agents for all losses in any given country are residents of that country…we depend on travelers from everywhere to move our bugs. In this case, the number of my trackables that found their own way to Europe (356) is more than four times those I sent there (75). The next post or two will illustrate why I am inclined to treat the relative numbers of missing trackables in Europe as proxy values for total trackable traffic in those countries. Said another way, I believe some regions have a very different ethic toward trackables than others.

The chief purpose of this post is to serve as a counterpoint to the next several posts. That is, where my trackables were released, which is detailed here, as opposed to where the trackables went missing, discussed later. My missing trackables were released in eight countries, as shown in the Release Locations table below. I personally left the few trackables in Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. All of the ones in Belgium and the United Kingdom (UK) grew from message exchanges with cachers in those nations. The first European releases were initiated by a Belgian cacher who was a fan of Buddy Holly. That person had inquired about some memorabilia from Buddy’s hometown, Lubbock, Texas. I supplied some keychain pendants and patches from the museum, along with a few of my own Buddy Holly-themed travel bugs. Later, I sent him a larger number of trackables to be released at a mega in his hometown of Bruges. Two other Belgians have also asked for, and released, trackables in their home country. The releases in the United Kingdom (UK) grew out as a simple back and forth with cacher in England. In 2015, he and I started regularly exchanging trackables in Stargate fashion, also including in the packages a few trackables of our own making. I still send travel bugs to him, but after I began to understand the comparatively high rate of trackable attrition in this country, and Texas in particular, I declined to take more. I just don’t want to be the agent for somebody’s disappointment. By far the greatest number of releases (96%) of my missing trackables was in the United States (US). A total of 93% were released in Texas and 86% were released into my own caches. The map of Texas below (created with Google Maps) shows the distribution of releases in the state. The red pointers indicate the locations of my own caches in northwestern Texas. Historically, they have totaled over 100, but only about 60 of them have ever been active at any one time. They are all small-to-regular sized containers, and mostly at roadsides in rural locations. The blue pointers are locations of my releases elsewhere in the state. I frequently revisit caches that have successfully launched my trackables in the past. The few other release locations in the US and Canada are shown in the US and southern Canada map below. I only hunt for caches when I am traveling for other purposes, and then only for containers that can take a trackable or two. This accounts for the meager cache finds (432 at this writing) for someone who has been caching for more than 13 years. The release locations in Europe (no map) are only ten in number, because of the way I started keeping records. I treat exchanges and handoffs as drops, and in these cases, I ask the recipients to visit the bug to their nearest cache, to obtain a location. The next post in this series will summarize the distribution of the last-logged locations of my missing trackables.

In this post I will detail the circumstances under which my trackables went missing, or became inactive. As much as anything, the documenting of it has been a study in human behavior. Our game has no formal rules and no accountability, and we humans do not exhibit predictable behavior without reinforcement. To be clear, most cachers precisely document their caching activities. However, there are nearly as many who don’t. For example, in the log menu, the retrieve, grab and discover options are used interchangeably by some cachers. Other cachers use the write-note option for all transactions. Some other cachers move trackables without logs at either end, while still others apparently guess at log dates and cache locations, well after the fact. The point being, much interpretation was required to assemble the table below. Furthermore, I accepted actions and dates as recorded, although I know many of them cannot be true. Thus, the classification and results in the table below suggest a tidiness to the data that is perhaps unwarranted. First however, my definition of missing doesn’t necessarily mean a trackable vanished without a trace. That is undeniably the case for most of them, as they disappeared from an active container without benefit of any kind of log. Trackables lost in vanished or destroyed containers are treated missing as well. My definition also includes trackables that were logged out of a container, and possibly visited other caches, but eventually ceased to travel, while remaining in possession of the cacher. These trackables are not strictly missing, but they might as well be, since their traveling days are done. As for retrieving pertinent data for this analysis, an unusual bit of foresight was a real bonus. When cataloging my trackables, I linked the tracking code on the spreadsheet to the trackable homepage, enabling me to bypass a multi-step search for the homepage using the tracking or ID numbers. Once on the homepage, I read every log from the last drop-off to the very last log, if any. After gathering the details I wanted, I followed the link from that page to home page of the last known cache, where I extracted even more information. Refer to the table to see my classification and analysis of how my trackables went missing. There is high certainty with the first level of the classification, Cacher Losses versus Cache-and-Contents losses. It was basically a yes/no choice as to whether or not the trackable was on the cache inventory when it was lost. If it was not in the cache, it was assumed to have been retrieved by someone. Cacher Losses. Cacher losses were over 95% of the total, with nearly 54% just disappearing from an active cache without a log of any kind. An active cache is one having logged visits immediately after the trackable drop. Occasionally there is a comment in the cache log that a trackable was retrieved, but there is no way of knowing if the trackable was mine. Only 1% of the trackables were lost at an event where they were formally released. I confess to being very surprised by this low percentage. These data and recent experiences have finally relieved me of a long-held bias against trackables at events. Many years ago, when I still naively believed all my trackables had a future, several of my earliest travel bugs went missing at a single mega event in Austin…I was stunned that such a thing could happen at a gathering of committed geocachers. Trackables do disappear at events, but not nearly at the rate they do from unobserved containers I was also surprised by the high percentage (39%) of trackables that were logged out of caches and simply held by cachers for 3-10 years. I will do a detailed accounting of this occurrence at a later time, but for now I will state that the holders are not all newbies, nor are they all non-premium members. A quick count shows slightly over 900 different cachers are holding a single trackable, whereas another 50+ cachers are holding 2-11 trackables. A good many of the cachers holding multiples bugs are my fellow TXGA members. The small number of unclassified retrievals could probably be included with held bugs. They were instances when the trackable retrieval date did not did not show a corresponding visit to the stated cache by the cacher, plus or minus two weeks. There several explanations, but the logical one is the increasingly common practice of logging the retrieval and drop at same time, on the drop date. A total of nine lost trackable is almost certainly less than the actual number. However, these are the only ones reported to me, usually with profuse apologies. I suspect that some number of lost bugs, and collected bugs for that matter, are concealed by performing bogus drops to remove them from cacher inventories. The one retired trackable is the only one of 25 released that lasted long enough to accomplish the specific mission. It arrived in my granddaughter’s hands, from Lubbock to Houston, by way of Hong Kong. Cache Losses. Compared to cacher losses, cache-and-contents losses were relative minor at 4.4%. The largest contributor to these trackable losses were in caches that were either vandalized (muggled) or neglected by the cache owners and archived by reviewers. I originally wanted to sort this collection into the two categories because, at the extremes, they are easily identified. I gave up when it became clear that there were caches that might have been both vandalized and neglected, and then archived. I marvel at the owners who doggedly replace muggled caches. The new construction losses are from human agencies who unwittingly destroy a cache and/or its hiding place. This includes clearing vacant lots, mowing rights-of-way, bridge and guardrail repairs and fence construction. Guardrail destruction by vehicles is included here because the guardrail must be repaired. I have many guardrail caches and the frequency of guardrail damage it has been a revelation. Most of the time I have been able to recover the container. There were five of my trackables lost in caches from natural disasters. Two were from floods, two were from brush fires and one was from a tornado. Three containers and resident trackables were lost to administrative removals. Examples are caches placed on property without permission and caches judged by park authorities to be in hazardous locations. None of these trackables went back into circulation. Finally, let me say that if someone else were to repeat this project with the same missing trackable pool, it is unlikely they would arrive at the same numbers. There is just too much interpretation required. That said, I am certain there would not be differences by orders-of-magnitude. I will stand by an approximate 95% and 5% split between cacher and cache losses, and an approximate 54% and 40% losses from unlogged retrievals versus logged retrievals.

When is a trackable really missing? That is a question that has vexed me for all the years I have been maintaining records on my trackables. I keep my larger caches stocked with new trackables because those caches are the chief means of distributing them. I routinely revisit those caches soon after a visit by another cacher because I have learned that almost 60% of the time, one or more trackables will have been taken from my caches without a retrieve-log on the date of the actual retrieval. Is such a trackable missing? It is true that about 16% of the new trackables left in one of my containers will never be heard from again. However, I can’t know that until years have passed. I estimate that only half of my trackables are logged in real time. The other trackables will be held without logs for periods ranging from days to years. So, when is it possible to conclude a given trackable is missing? For this project, I needed a practical definition of missing for which the wait-and-see is not inordinately long, but is long enough that the reappearance of a few long-missing trackables would not materially change the study results. To make this determination, I referred to the drop-interval table for my trackables (see the 2010-22 Drop Interval table below). The Drop Interval Table is an accounting of days between drops or exchanges of possession of my trackables between cachers. The table shows the frequency distribution of the 34,633 drop intervals occurring among my trackables over a 13-year period, ending 31 Dec 2022. This table is regenerated automatically with the recording of every new trackable drop. The data show that a little more than 60% (the first line) of the drops occur within two months (60 days) of the previous drop. I take this to mean that a missing trackable without an appropriate log for up to 60 days is very likely still in play. The table also shows (the blue cell) that a little over 95% of the intervals occur inside one year, meaning the chances are still good for a trackable to resume activity for up to a year. After a one-year-missing interval, the probability of a trackable resuming travel drops dramatically, but it can occur out to more than ten years. As for the definition of missing for this project, I settled on a more-than-three-years criterion (the yellow cells). Thus, my missing trackable pool includes 2,675 trackables without an appropriate log for the years 2010-19. This is 70.5% of the 3,793 trackables released in the same period. I accept that having assembled this pool of missing trackables, about 0.6% of them may reappear while I am working up these data. I will not update the missing-trackable pool during this project, but will trust that the number of reappearing trackables will remain so small that the work will not be compromised. A missing trackable is defined as one having no appropriate log, that is, no logged drops, grabs, retrievals, or visits for at least three years. As with all projects documenting my trackable longevity, I read but mostly ignore discovery-logs. Discoveries will sometimes continue for years after a travel bug has disappeared, depending on how long a list of tracking numbers gets circulated. However, if a last-log is a discovery which includes words to the effect that a trackable was retrieved, that date was used. Similarly, if a cacher note referred to a retrieval, grab or visit, that date was also used. Once the pool of missing bugs was fixed, I recorded details about every trackable, a good bit of which I may never use. I chose to record too much information at the outset, rather than to be confronted with the possibility of wishing I had captured something more when I was summarizing the data. The data pool started with my existing trackable catalog, which is in spreadsheet form. That catalog initially included the trackable name, the ID and tracking numbers, the date released, where released and two numbers based on a combination of the date of release and the ID number. One number sequence is the overall catalog number starting with 0001, the other is an annual sequence which begins with 001 with the first release of each year. For example, The State Flag of Idaho (TB6CA4N), the first release of 2015, is 15-001, but also 1723, the overall release number. For the present project, new information about each trackable was added to the existing catalog. This included, but was not restricted to, last-log dates, last cache ID numbers and their respective locations (with coordinates), last cache status, drops achieved, age in days/years, miles traveled, and, when known, the cacher holding the trackable. The later posts about of this project will be a series of overviews of the findings. I have no idea how many posts there will be. Because of the large amount of information that can be sorted and resorted, there is a huge potential for new revelations…maybe the use of the term revelations is an overstatement, because much of the information will be suspected by experienced cachers, but just never quantified.

Sometimes one gets so immersed in a project, things are overlooked.

This post is an introduction to how to interpret the graphs and tables in the larger project to come. I will use my Love Bug series as the study collection. All the Love Bugs are heart-shaped items attached to dog tags by rivets or chains, and are of different sizes and materials (leather, wood, stone, glass, metal, plastic). The series is not the largest, but is one of the oldest, the first ones were released in 2010, and examples have been released in every year since, now 2023. Refer to the figure and appended table below. The bottom row in the table is the n, or the number of trackables in the series that achieved each successive drop. As noted in Part 3, the sample sizes decline from 274 trackables at Drop 1 to 11 at Drop 30. The decline results from attrition rates of 11-16% between the earliest drops to 4-9% between later drops…this was also demonstrated in Part 3. The solid-colored lines in the graph represent the top three rows of the table. They are the maximum (blue line) and minimum (gray) number of days required for a single trackable to achieve a specified drop. The orange line is the average days for all trackables to achieve a specific drop. The dotted line is the trend line for the average. The jagged shape of the maximum line (blue) is caused by individual trackables having outliers whose cumulative days remain high until they disappear. An example is the trackable with the high of 3851 days at drop 11. Drop 12 was three days later, after which time it disappeared leaving the next highest maximum trackable to be tabulated and graphed. The data can be read in several ways. For example, the average for 274 trackables to make the first drop is 105 days after release. The maximum to the first drop was 1578 days (4.3 years), whereas the minimum days to the first drop was two days, a range of 1476 days (4.3 years). For 30 drops, the average is 2079 days (5.7 years), with maximum and minimum values at 3085 days (8.5 years) and 884 days (2.4 years). The average rate of travel for the Love Bug collection is 69 days per drop (2079 total days ÷ 30 drops) Alternatively, if we want to know the average number of drops achieved in the first year (365 days), from the graph we can visually estimate between three and four drops per year. Or, we can interpolate the value to 3.8 drops per year, (4 X 365) ÷ 382. The variables “days per drop” and/or “drops per year) will be the basis of comparisons among the various series of trackables. Note that the line for the average (orange) days starts to become a little ragged in the range of 8-9 drops. This is the point where, because of decreasing sample sizes, a number of large outliers can unduly influence averages. One might normally believe that a sample size of more than 100 trackables would be adequate to mask those effects, but it is clearly not the case when intervals between drops are measured in multiple years. Part 6 of this post is a pool all series of trackable having representatives with 30 or more drops.

I have examined a specific segment of my trackables to establish a baseline rate of travel that should represent my entire collection of trackables…see the large figure and appended table below. The methods used to assemble the data are detailed in the previous five parts to this post. As before, the bottom row in the table is the n, or the number of trackables in the series that achieved each successive drop. The sample sizes decline from 3449 trackables at Drop 1 to 154 at Drop 30. The decline results from high attrition between early drops, losses of 11-16% while trackables are in the US, to 4-9% when the oldest-surviving trackables are outside the US. The solid-colored lines in the graph represent the top three rows of the table. They are the maximum (blue line) and minimum (gray) number of days required for a single trackable to achieve a specified drop. The orange line is the average days (the baseline) for all trackables to achieve a specific drop. The dotted line is the trend line for the average. The baseline is derived from the 24 series of trackables shown in the baseline contributors table below. The series are sorted into potential groupings that will likely be the basis of future comparisons. In those comparisons, the maximum and minimum lines will be omitted. They are retained here to illustrate the huge range of days for trackables to achieve specific drops. For example, for Drop 1, the min/max range is 0 to 3902 days, meaning there was one trackable released, retrieved and dropped again on the same day, whereas another trackable took 3902 days (10.7 years) to achieve the first drop. At 30 drops, the min/max values are 580 and 3966, respectively 1.6 and 10.9 years. The average to 30 drops is 1552 days (4.3 years). For convenience, I have also provided a days-to-years conversion table for each drop (see also below). The data at every drop are badly skewed because zero is the absolute limit to the minimum number of available days between drops, whereas there is no limit to the maximum. For the readers with a statistical bent, the standard (or average) deviation from the mean for each drop ranges from equal to, or more than twice that of the measured mean (average)…for normal (bell-shaped) distribution of values, we like to have values less than five percent of the mean, as opposed to the 100-200 percent seen here. Regrettably, the methods to attach any statistical significance to observed differences for skewed data have receded into the mental fog. Still, I can entertain myself by calculating averages and determining trends. The average rate of travel over 30 drops is 51.7 days (1552 ÷ 30), but that doesn’t tell the complete story. The rate of travel during the first 15 drops (when more than half of the trackables are in the US) is 67.2 days per drop (1008 ÷ 15), whereas the rate for drops 16 through 30 (when more than half of the surviving trackables are outside the US, mostly Europe) is 36.3 days per drop ([1552 – 1008] ÷ 15). While I do believe trackables move more frequently in Europe than in the US, these values do not constitute proof, they are merely suggestive. The reason being there are unquantified fractions from each region represented in early and late drops. That said, if I ever decide to winnow and compare US-only and Europe-only cohorts, I have every confidence that the difference will be even greater than reported here. That there are differences in the early and late rates of travel can be seen by comparing the baseline with the trend line. The trend line is straight while the baseline is a gentle arc, reflecting how the rate of travel decreases with subsequent drops. This the concluding part of this post. This project will continue later with another multi-part post comparing series of trackables with each other, and to the baseline.

The figure and appended table below show the activity of a single trackable, TB6RVM5. On the figure, the black line (elapsed days between drops) shows the trackable did not move at a regular rate. Most of the intervals lie in the range of 60 to 100 days. The lowest outlier is zero, at drop 4, when the bug was logged as placed, retrieved and placed again, on the same day. The highest outliers are at drops 4 and 13, when the drop intervals were 989 and 659 days (respectively 2.7 and 1.8 years). This is typical of how bugs move…a nominal pace of travel, with the occasional long period between drops. The drop interval table below shows the current frequency distribution of the periods of time between drops for all my trackables…this table is also regenerated automatically with the recording of new drops. The data show that a little more than 60% of the drops my trackables have made are within two months (60 days) of the previous drop. It is the other nearly 40% that are the outliers. These long intervals, two of which are out past ten years, result either from a cacher holding the trackable, or rarely, from a trackable resting in a rarely-visited container. The point of cumulative vs elapsed figure is to demonstrate how the elapsed days between drops (the black line) affects the shape of the line for cumulative days (the red line). Cumulative days are the sum of the current and previous intervals. The trend is upward, but hardly a straight line, because of the influence of outliers. Nevertheless, if one wishes to measure the average time to specific drop milestones, cumulative data are the best means. Thus, we learn that this particular travel bug made 20 drops over a period of 2702 days, for an average rate of travel of a drop every 135 days (2702 ÷ 20). How can the average be that high if 18 of the 20 intervals were below the average? The reason is because of the two high values at drops 3 and 13 skew the data. Finally, an alternative way to view the data is days to specific drops. It took 1519 days (4.1 years) for this trackable to reach ten drops, whereas the time to 20 drops was 2792 days (7.4 years). The time from 10-20 is less than the time to ten drops. Part 5 of this post will display the analysis multiple trackables from a single trackable series, graphed in much the same manner, but showing only cumulative days

It is not surprising to anyone having trackables that some last longer than others. As mentioned in Part 2, I measure survivorship in terms of drops achieved. Refer to the survivorship curve (blue line) in the figure below. The curve shows the percent of the total trackables released that have reached a specified drop. This curve is automatically regenerated as new drops are entered on spreadsheets…it was current as of this writing. The choice of a 30-drops minimum for study inclusion was based on the histories of my trackables. Circumstances influencing that choice are indicated by arrows on the curve. There are two things that must be understood about the curve. First, every trackable released contributes to it. Secondly, at least two-thirds of those trackables are missing. A missing trackable is defined as one having no logged retrieval-, visit-, or release-log for three years. For this particular project, I ignore increasingly-bogus discovery-logs as they will sometimes continue for years after a travel bug has disappeared. I will discuss what constitutes “missing” in more detail in a project later this year, but for now the reader must accept there is a less than one percent chance a that one of my trackables will resume activity after three years (see the Drop Interval Table in Part 4). Thus, because most of the bugs are inactive, the shape of the curve is fixed and has not materially changed since about 2017, except for the attenuation of the number of drops achieved…now one trackable at 88 drops. The shape of the curve is determined the by loss of trackables between drops, losses that incrementally reduce the sample sizes for subsequent drops. Note that 50% of the trackable have gone missing before the sixth drop, which is usually around 9-10 months. Meanwhile, the rate of attrition declines through successive drops…see the dotted trend line on the percent attrition figure below. A trend line is a mathematically-derived track of the averages, expressed as a straight line. This figure is also automatically regenerated with new data. Even with decreasing attrition rates, sample sizes at later drops are still reduced to nearly-unusable numbers. For example, Love Bugs (heart-shaped items), one of the oldest and largest series, has a total of 274 releases. However, only 11 trackables have achieved as many as 30 drops…this will be more completely illustrated in Part 5 of this post. Then, there are several series that have never had one trackable even reach ten drops, either because their original number of releases is too few to survive the rate of loss, or because the series is too new and there are no representatives old enough to have achieved 30 drops. The small numbers to reach 30 drops are what makes direct comparisons among all groups impossible at this time. The next point of interest is the curve at 13-16 drops. That range is when half of the surviving trackables are located in the United States (US), while the other half are in other countries, mostly in Europe. Annually, beginning in 2014, I either dropped or sent trackables to Europe. However, they have always been a small minority, usually around 5% of the total released. Meanwhile, some of the trackables I released in the US from 2010 on, have been taken outside the US by other cachers. Those trackables are nearly double the number I have sent or taken abroad. The reason that trackables outside the US begin to dominate after 13-15 drops is, in part, because the attrition rate in Europe (4-9%) is approximately half that in the US (11-16%). Again, see the smaller figure below. The last important circumstance on the survivorship curve is at 45 drops. Among my trackables that have never had a drop outside US, none have survived past this point. This means all trackables having made 45 or more drops either left the US or started in Europe. Thus, if I wanted any representation by trackables outside the US, I had to include drops out to at least 30. If the reader doubts that trackables survive longer, and move more frequently in Europe, particularly in the north, see my earlier forum posts on this topic. Although my desire to compare travel histories among all my many series of trackables must be shelved for now, I am not prevented from pooling part of the trackable data to establish a baseline for my 30-drop trackable collection. Part 4 of this post will address the means by which the rate of trackable travels will be expressed.

At the heart of evaluating of rates of travel is documenting the start and finish and the time between. For this study, the starting point, or Time 0, is date when a trackable is released from my possession, and is either logged into a cache or grabbed from me by another cacher. The release is not the activation date, which can be months earlier because I assemble and activate trackables in batches. As of 2 Jan 2023, a total of 5,045 trackables have been released in in eight countries (see the release locations table below). By far, the greatest number were released in the United States (mostly in northwest Texas). Historically, the number released outside the US has totaled about five percent per year. However, in 2022, I released 25 at an event in Scotland and sent another 41 to England, to bring to total released abroad to over six percent for the first time. As for milestones, I do not define survivorship, or longevity, in terms of time passing or distance traveled, but rather as the number of challenges met and overcome. In the context of geocaching, these challenges are the drops achieved…somewhat like the trials of Hercules, but not on the scale of subduing a lion or stealing an Amazon’s girdle. A drop is defined as a surrender of possession of a trackable, or that point at which there is an immediate change in risk to the trackable resulting from different behaviors among individual cachers and cache owners. A drop is usually a release into a cache, or sometimes at an event, but it can also be a direct handoff from one cacher to another. Though not investigated, I believe direct handoffs between cachers, and even drops at events, are the safest changes of possession, since those transactions bypass the risk of resting in untended caches. If that distinction had occurred to me when I started keeping records, I could have addressed that question with certainty, but I am not now going to re-examine the more than 34,000 drops accrued by my trackables. I accept drop-log dates at face value. While many log dates are scrupulously correct, I know others are recorded at times of convenience, sometimes stretching into months post-event. Some drops are not logged at all, requiring some interpretation of actions. For example, the typical sequence is a drop-log followed by a retrieve-log, then another drop-log, and so on. Some cachers use the “grab” function instead of the designed “retrieve” function. A series of grabs by different cachers without intervening drop logs, still means exchanges have occurred. Other cachers simply write a note that a trackable was dropped off, frequently without other details. Then, there are the occasions when email notifications fail and no drop-, grab- or retrieve logs are received. In those instances, I may only learn of a drop if an email of a later drop is received…I always go back to the last recorded log in my files to check. The point being, the total drops I report represent the minimum number achieved. Varying trackable stewardship issue aside, inaccurate log dates do not affect this project because the time-line is essentially self-correcting. For a given trackable, if a drop-date log is tardy by X days, the elapsed days to the next drop date is decreased by the same X number of days. What really matters is the total number of drops and the total days from release to the last drop. Part 3 of this post details how trackable attrition profoundly affected the study design

There are recurring questions about trackable endurance and travel on the forum for which there are often very good responses, but based on limited information. The writer in a position to address most of the questions in more detail, and will do so in a series of posts over the next couple of years. I will explain. From January of 2010 to January 2023, I have released over 5,000 travel bugs at a rate of 200-450 per year. Over 13+ years some of the trackables have visited caches all over the world. They have been to every state in the US, every major administrative district (state, province, canton, oblast) in the countries of western and northern Europe, including the principalities of Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein and Monaco. My trackables have visited caches on every continent, including Antarctica. For now, the best supports of that claim are my past forum posts and the screen-captured map below, produced by gctrackables.com in open beta testing. What is shown is the distribution a sample of only a thousand of my trackables, sorted into either traveling trackables (blue markers) and missing trackables (green). For reasons unknown to me, not shown are the distribution of some trackables in caches. My trackables are not uniform in shape, size or composition. Some are simply the celebration tags marketed by Groundspeak (Makers, Holiday, CITO, Geopets, Zodiac, etc.), usually without attached items. However, most trackables do have items attached to dog tags (by chains or rivets) which can be glass, stone, wood, leather, metal, cloth patches or laminated images. Many are the size of poker chips (some are poker chips), others are smaller. There are keychain and jewelry pendants. The largest are laminated images measuring 2.25 x 3.25”. There are very few geocoins and no bowling pins or beanie babies. Should the reader wish to see photos of the trackables, they are all listed alphabetically by series name behind the “owned trackables” link on my profile page. I keep records on my trackables by series, based on either a theme or a general shape…see the first entries of the partial Comics spreadsheet below. After I enter drop dates, elapsed days between drops and the cumulative days between release and the most recent drop are calculated automatically. Shown in the first two columns are the number of drops achieved (Cnt for count) and the most recent drop log date (Last Log). These are also calculated automatically. A zero in the Cnt column means the trackable has either not moved, or has disappeared from, the container where it was released. I also maintain a catalog of my trackables…see partial catalog spreadsheet below. It displays part of the catalog with details about the Art Deco series. I hid many columns to make important information viewable as an image. There are two catalog numbers, the annual and total. Trackables are not cataloged until they are released. All entries start with the name, ID and tracking numbers and release dates and locations. The colored ID cells indicate missing travel bugs. For those, there is information on the last logged locations and dates, along with the count (Cnt) of drops achieved (retrieved from the respective series spreadsheet). The ultimate objective of this approach, decided upon years ago, was to enable comparisons of the rates of travel and survivorship among the series. For example, as a group, do poker chips have better histories than laminated images? For a series to be included for comparison in this project, I determined that each series must have at least one trackable achieve 30 drops, but there is a problem with that choice. Being 83 at this writing, there might not be enough time for me to do as much as once conceived. So, I will content myself with limited comparisons. Part 2 of this post defines release and drop, as employed in this project.

I absolutely believe there are there are significant regional and cultural differences toward logging and handling trackables here in the US, as well as internationally. I have the sense that best cachers everywhere are the same, but there may be more uncommitted or indifferent cachers is some places than others. The problem is I can't figure out how to tease away other factors that might cloud the issue. On a quick glance at data, I might conclude that Wisconsin and other states of the Upper Midwest are the best places for my trackables, in terms of frequency of movement and longevity. However, I note that these trackables are consistently moved by the same few cachers. What does that mean? On the other hand I might conclude that Texas is the absolute worst place for trackables, since about 60% of them go missing here. Half of my trackables are gone before five drops. The problem is, Texas is large enough that it can take more than five drops to escape the state. Is it fair to make comparisons to contiguous states, or states out of reach of five drops? Texas has some large urban areas, but most of the state is rural, like most of the western states. Perhaps not to the same extent as Australia, but we have have some large regions without caches or cachers...I personally have roadside caches that average only 2-3 visits per year, and the best ones are 35. By contrast, look at a cache density on the caching map of Germany or the the Netherlands. Furthermore I have trackables in caches on mountains of Colorado and Utah that have not been visited for years, there is nary a one in the European alps. Then again, we are playing a game with neither rules nor consequences for bad behavior...what should we expect?

I used to ask for photos in my trackable mission statement, and the geocaching public responded. Some of the images were really interesting, and like you, I wanted to share them. So, I started a blog (here). As an incentive, I went so far as to include the link to the blog in the mission statement, to illustrate how photos would be displayed. Eventually though, as I released more trackables, the images started arriving faster and faster. Sorting, editing and uploading became drudgery...it was the tail wagging the dog, so I quit.

This post discusses the history of 23 5- to 10-year-old trackables that have made only 40-44 drops. This is the same collection discussed in the previous post, but examined in a different manner. Here, data were supplemented and tabulated to show the travels of each trackable. The table includes the release locations and dates, and last locations and dates (as of Dec 2021). Also provided is the ID number, the age of each trackable at last the last logged date and a brief summary of the countries traveled. The country names are abbreviated to the universal three-letter designations as shown in the smaller table below. In the release and last location columns, more specific regions within a country are also provided. Of the 23 trackables achieving 40-44 drops, 14 (<1%) releases were of more than 2100 to mostly roadside containers in my core caching area in northwest Texas. There were nine releases in Europe. Those in France are two (50%) of four I dropped in caches on the Normandy beaches. Those in Belgium are seven (23%) of 30 released at a Mega in Bruges, by a Belgian fan of Buddy Holly. That person’s releases of my trackables were in exchange for Buddy memorabilia sent from Buddy’s hometown. Far, far fewer US releases have reached as many as 40 drops. Similarly, if we examine the last locations of these same 23 trackables, we see that two (nos. 1, 16) were in the US while the remainder were in Europe. Neither of the two last located in the US, had their travel history wholly in the US (consult the rightmost column of the table). Some readers might object that the trackable (no. 1) having been across the border in Canada is no different than being in the US. However, I have the unsubstantiated opinion that Canadian stewardship of trackables is more like that observed in Europe, than in the US. Wherever the reader stands on this point, unlike in Europe, it remains exceedingly rare for a trackable never leaving the US, to be moved by as many as 40 different cachers. I would remind the reader that I have other trackables having made out to 75 drops, and more, and all of them are in Europe. One final point can be made. The arrangement of countries in in the Chief Travel column is not in the sequence of visitation. The first country listed is that of release. Next listed is the one most commonly visited by that trackable and all the other trackables, and so on. All but one of these trackables has been dropped in Germany (DEU) at one point, followed by the Netherlands (NLD) and Belgium (BEL). This is why I and others have remarked that if a trackable survives long enough, no matter the origin, the trackable will pass through northern Europe, and more specifically, Germany.

For each of my trackables, I record the date of release and the dates of all subsequent drops (or changes of possession). The total number drops divided into the total days between the dates of release and last drop is the average movement interval for that trackable. Low interval numbers mean frequent movement, higher numbers are slower movement. To understand these numbers on drops a per-year basis, see the Conversion Table below. My trackables are not uniform. Some are just a tag alone in circulation, whereas most are the usual dog tag attached to items of varying sizes, shapes and materials. This post is the first step in comparing endurance and rates of travel among trackables that can be confidently sorted into discrete groups, poker chips, flag patches, laminated images, etc. In the meantime, I will report on the observed drop intervals in some of my oldest trackables as a whole. The present sample includes only trackables released in the years 2010-2015. Old trackables have the advantage of yielding values that will not change, because all but a handful have been missing for 5-10 years. Those few trackables that are still active, including some released in 2010, all have total drop numbers above 50, out to 75. This project does not extend that far, with drops numbers only to the range of 40-44. Furthermore, for higher drop totals, once they get beyond 50, an excessive interval will have only a barely discernable effect on the average. I keep up with my trackables by theme or series. The Sample Organization Table below shows the names of the series and part of the organization for this project. The values between the green columns are those intervals from trackables having made only 1-4 drops. The values between green and gold columns are intervals for trackables having made 40-44 drops. Not shown are seven other intermediate data sets in 5-drop increments. The abbreviations in the table are as follows: n, sample size; %, the percent of the series n; Ave, the arithmetic average interval; Min, the minimum interval observed; Max, the maximum value observed. A description of the trackables in in each series will be done in a later post, although the titles make many of the forms evident. The gray line in the graph has nothing to do with the drop intervals but, but is the sample sizes within each interval range…in a happy circumstance, the same scale as for intervals could be used. That line is essentially the same survivorship curve posted before, but with data pooled into discrete drop ranges. By almost any standard, a sample size of 885 for the 1-4 range is more than adequate. However, because of the high rate of attrition, the sample sizes drastically decrease through the other drop ranges, finishing with a 23 total for the 40-44 range. I elected not to graph the actual maximum and minimum values shown on the table. Instead, I used the mean of all the maximum (red line and red numbers) and minimum (blue line and blue numbers) values for each series. To have graphed the 1819 maximum for the Country Flags would have increased the distortion of the scale and merged the colored lines at the bottom, an important part of the graph. The averages (black line) are those for all the intervals in each interval range, not the averages of the averages, as for minimums and maximums. I showed in previous posts that around 95 percent of my 4500+ trackables are released in the US, mostly in northwest Texas. Furthermore, among all my trackables that survive to make 15 drops (around 13%), only half are in the US, most of the others are in Europe. Of those in Europe, only a little more than 200 were released there, another 700+ were independently taken there by other cachers. Thus, we may interpret that the part of the colored curves to the left of the 15-19 interval range result mostly from trackables in the US, and the curve to right is mostly from trackables outside the US, mostly Europe. The important point to be made is that at the left side (US) of the table and graph, the average drop interval is 132 days, or a rate of just over three drops per year. At the right, the average interval is 65 days, or almost six drops per year. Clearly it is the high extreme intervals (years, in many instances) on the US side and the lack of extremes on the right that most influence the average values. These data are part of the reason I am willing to state that trackable in Europe move almost twice as often (on average) as those here in the US. That more trackables last longer in Europe, will be addressed, in part, in the next post.