Cache by city or town

[+lilwandrer]

I'm would love to be able to do my caching by city or town. I know we can search by zip code, but that search always includes nearby towns no matter how I set my search parameter. Is there another way to just find all the caches in a particular town or city??

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I'm would love to be able to do my caching by city or town. I know we can search by zip code, but that search always includes nearby towns no matter how I set my search parameter. Is there another way to just find all the caches in a particular town or city??

 

That wouldn't really be feasible unless Groundspeak had access to boundary information for every city in the world. When you enter a zipcode or a city/town name the site uses a reverse geocoding service to look up that feature name using an external service. That service returns a set of coordinates for a center point and it would also need bounding coordinates which defined a polygon for the city/town border to satisfy your suggestion. Even if GS did get that information, filtering the results of a search such that it only returned caches within that polygon would likely be slow and time consuming.

 

Why would you want to do something like this?

[+Harry Dolphin]

That wouldn't really be feasible unless Groundspeak had access to boundary information for every city in the world. When you enter a zipcode or a city/town name the site uses a reverse geocoding service to look up that feature name using an external service. That service returns a set of coordinates for a center point and it would also need bounding coordinates which defined a polygon for the city/town border to satisfy your suggestion. Even if GS did get that information, filtering the results of a search such that it only returned caches within that polygon would likely be slow and time consuming.

 

Actually, there is something very wrong with the zip code search. My zip code search takes me to a spot 4.5 miles north of the post office, and center of town. It's in an entirely different zipcode!

[+JohnCNA]

Then use coordinates to specify your center. Google Earth is free and easily does this. I tend to cache by forest preserve; similar to what you want to do. I set a PQ to the center and download it into BaseCamp. BC visually shows them all on a map and I multi-delete those from the surrounding area that I'm not interested in. Export the finished GPX to my Garmin and smartphone and we're ready to go.