What are power trails?

[+Kissyfurs]

I've seen a couple of people refer to power trails? What are these and how do I find them?

[+Semper Questio]

I've seen a couple of people refer to power trails? What are these and how do I find them?

 

Power trails are typically a string of a rather large number of caches hidden all pretty much the same way and as close together as possible.

 

There is no site-defined way to readily identify them. No special type or attrihbute. Some power trails use something like the scuba attribute in the middle of a desert to identify them, but this is by no means a standard. Your best bet is to look at the map and look for a large string of tihghtly placed caches.

[Pup Patrol]

I've seen a couple of people refer to power trails? What are these and how do I find them?

 

Generally speaking, a power trail is just a whole lot of caches in a line.

 

The most famous one, I guess, is the ET Highway in Nevada.

 

There's power trails everywhere. Go to the geocaching map, and zoom out. You will start to see those long, unbroken lines of green boxes. Zoom back in and wonder at the ability of people to plunk down containers every 528 feet.

 

I did some zooming in your state and found a moderate-sized power trail.

 

Go to http://coord.info/GC3TNBZ and open the map. Then zoom out.

 

 

B.

[+niraD]

The term "power trail" used to mean a log of caches spaced closely along a trail or road. The caches weren't necessarily owned by the same account, they weren't necessarily the same size, and they weren't necessarily hidden the same way. There's a nice one around here that the county parks department still uses for intro geocaching classes, because new geocachers can experience a dozen or so varied geocaches during a 2-3 hour hike.

 

The modern "power trails" like the ET Highway caches are what Semper Questio describes as "a rather large number of caches hidden all pretty much the same way and as close together as possible". These power trails were designed to facilitate numbers runs, where geocachers find as many caches as possible during the time allotted. (That's why I use the term "numbers run trail" to describe these trails.) These caches are completely interchangeable with each other: identical containers (typically film canisters), all hidden in the same way, spaced every 528ft/161m, with copy-paste cache descriptions (..., 721/2000, 722/2000, 723/2000,...). Teams can average more than 60 caches an hour, including the time it takes to drive to the next cache.

[+Kacher82]

Go to http://coord.info/GC3TNBZ and open the map. Then zoom out.

That looks like my kind of trail. Hidden along a bike trail, so you're at least getting some exercise.