e-bird67

Actually, I do agree with the part about emphasizing the beauty of the outdoors to children, rather than on finding the "prize". We spend most of our weekends in the outdoors, as a family. But since she's only 4 and new to geocaching, I want to get her hooked right away, so we're focusing on caches with swag until she's addicted. Last weekend, my hubby and I went out by ourselves to a nice hiking area and found 3 caches; 2 of which were micros. If I'm doing a loop in a beautiful and/or interesting place and there are micros along with traditional caches, I might as well find all of them, right? I never considered the cost factor! I have never actually placed a cache, but I imagine it adds up quickly!

Well, that's pretty obvious. My question was more about why there are so many more micros now than there were in the early 2000's. I just upgraded to premium membership, so it will be much easier for me to avoid them now. Amen! For us, geocaching was just a natural extension of our a) love for hiking, backpacking and the great outdoors; and enjoying techie toys. If there's not a hike involved, I'm not really interested. I'll have to poke around my premium membership to see if there's a way to exclude "park and grabs". I ended up in a parking lot filled with trash and broken glass the other day and just walked away. Thanks for the link Kit Fox!

If this topic has been covered recently, my apologies. I poked around, but didn't see a similar thread. My husband and I did some caching between 2001-2003 or so. We have a four year old daughter now, and we have started caching again, as she enjoys finding "hidden treasures". We were thrilled that there were hundreds of caches in our area; now there are thousands. But we've noticed that the sport has changed. First, many of the best natural areas, such as our nearby Duke Forest, have banned geocaching. I'm assuming that this has happening because some cachers were not good stewards, or because it took administrators a few years to catch on to the fact that geocaching existed within their area. And the other thing I've noticed is that there is a preponderance of microcaches. When we started caching, most caches were nice, roomy ammo boxes or other large containers, and they were full of great swag. We had a lot of themed caches in our area- just balls, or just DVDs, or whatever. Some of these still exist, but I'm finding that over half of the caches listed in our area appear to be tiny logs the size of fortune cookie papers in microscopic containers. (Ok- I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea!) Is there a reason for the trending towards microcaches? If there are environmental concerns with placing large boxes in wild places, I will quit my complaining, of course. Is it because it's considered more challenging to look for tiny caches that can barely be seen with the human eye? Is it because larger caches are being muggled? It's frustrating to me, because I'm trying to get my daughter excited about the sport, and trust me, doing the toy trade-off is much more fun for her than finding a tiny container with a single rolled up sheet of paper. Ah, well, either way, I get a beautiful hike out of it, so it's not all bad, right?

Hi! I've been lurking recently. My husband and I did some caching back in the early 2000's, but let life kick us in the tail and stopped until the past few months, when our 4 year old daughter expressed an interest in finding "hidden treasures". We're now caching as a family, and I'm amazed at how the sport has grown and evolved since 2001! We were excited that there were hundreds of caches in our area; now there are thousands!