I (Mrs Nilbog) am both a geocacher and a landowner...who identified a cache on their property - with no contact or permission from me. I live in Australia, but have landholdings in New Zealand and noticed that a cache was placed on a walkway across our property. What people don't know is that the only reason that the walkway was there - we as landowners had actually granted the local council specific permission to use a section of our land to create the walkway. So although it was public access, it came with specific conditions.
My biggest issue with it, was that although I had no issue with someone placing a cache, fossicking around or near the walkways, enjoying our property and did not want to prevent anyone from walkiing around this remarkable island - the real reason for placing this cache for the cache owner is the awesome view from the headland of this island and the only way to access that was to leave the pathway (which wanders around the sea level) and head straight up private property to the top!! Note - my property is 10 hectares of land.
We contacted the cache owner and after some issues with getting in contact with them, we contacted a local reviewer in NZ, explained that we owned the property and advised them of what our conditions for continued placement was... the reviewer was awesome, he/she apologised for the placement of the cache and archived it until such time as the cache owner complied with our request.
Our request was pretty simple...we asked the cache owner to clearly state in their description of the cache, that the headland was private property and that cachers must stick on or near to the walkways around the property...while this may not have prevented all cachers (yes some of us ignore the description!!!) from going up the hill, we wanted to not refuse access to this great sport...but get some kind of balance.
In our view, we always think that if you apply common sense and the cache owner gives you instructions like "Don't deviate from the path" or "Enter via gate B" or whatever, that you are being a little bit disrespectful to the cache owner, if you try the quicker or easier route!! Let's face it - you never know why the cache owner is giving the instructions they are...it could be because a landowner like us has decided to allow a cache on their private property on the basis that they hope that cachers will respect the property and stick to those areas, which do not disrupt the privacy of the landowner.
Despite our position - which we think was pretty reasonable - the cache owner didn't want to put that comment in their description...oh well.....maybe our request was not reasonable??? Who knows?
