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Dearth of new ALs


barefootjeff

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It's now been well over six months since my phone last notified me of a new AL, that happened back in early December. There are a total of eight around here on the NSW Central Coast, two of them mine, which were a bit of fun at the time but it's now all in the past tense. Much the same is true in the Newcastle region north of here where I've now completed all but three and those also date back to the second half of last year. Two of them overlap on a drive around Lake Macquarie so I'll probably knock them off together once our present COVID lockdown has lifted, and the other will be on a separate drive up the coast, then that will be it for me unless I start travelling even further afield.

 

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So I'm wondering if this is happening elsewhere, were ALs just a passing fad of 2020 or are new ones still appearing in other parts of the world?

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Nope, no apathy here in the San Francisco Bay area. Every time I looked at the map, there are new ones. I'm starting to get in the habit of looking whenever I'm going geocaching because it seems like about half the time, there's a new one that I didn't know about nearby. In fact, I just looked now and was surprised that there are easily 50 I haven't done within 30 miles of me. Before I looked, I was going to guess 20 because that's about how many I remember from the last time I looked at the broader area a month ago.

 

I would say they amounted to a fad in 2020, but now they're a thing.

 

One thing that's become popular is ALs following famous highways, so the Lincoln Highway and California Route 1 in this area. I'd say that's about 10 of those 50. Not only are they popping up all along those routes, but they typically have 10 stages instead of the normal 5.

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There are not many ALs around this rural area. I created one and have another credit waiting. I've had a few ideas for my next AL but for various reasons, none has worked out. For example, I wanted to do a tour of historic downtown bars and taverns but two of the five are closed after Covid. Perhaps after they reopen I can still make this work. Anyway, I appreciate that the time limit was removed so now I can wait to find just the right series of places with a good story to tell and reliable cell service.

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3 hours ago, dprovan said:

One thing that's become popular is ALs following famous highways, so the Lincoln Highway and California Route 1 in this area.

 

And a project to fill the Trans Canada Highway is on the go, and that spans the entirety of the country.

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20 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

It's now been well over six months since my phone last notified me of a new AL, that happened back in early December. There are a total of eight around here on the NSW Central Coast, two of them mine, which were a bit of fun at the time but it's now all in the past tense. Much the same is true in the Newcastle region north of here where I've now completed all but three and those also date back to the second half of last year. Two of them overlap on a drive around Lake Macquarie so I'll probably knock them off together once our present COVID lockdown has lifted, and the other will be on a separate drive up the coast, then that will be it for me unless I start travelling even further afield.

 

image.png.29ebd4b91ec9ee9cac1a976ef20c3f78.png

 

So I'm wondering if this is happening elsewhere, were ALs just a passing fad of 2020 or are new ones still appearing in other parts of the world?

The main question would be how many unused AL credit are there around you. Groundspeak only release a specific number from time to time so maybe no one in your area got one recently?

 

If you want a lot of ALs around you I would suggest to ask Groundspeak about creating an Highway 1 AL project in Australia.

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8 minutes ago, Lynx Humble said:

The main question would be how many unused AL credit are there around you. Groundspeak only release a specific number from time to time so maybe no one in your area got one recently?

 

The lack of any new ones on the Central Coast doesn't greatly surprise me as we don't have many active cachers here now (there have only been seven new regular caches here this year and three of those are mine), but Newcastle is a different kettle of fish, being (I think) the biggest regional city in the country. Most of those who've published one AL have also done a second one so there probably aren't too many unused credits out there.

 

7 hours ago, dprovan said:

One thing that's become popular is ALs following famous highways, so the Lincoln Highway and California Route 1 in this area. I'd say that's about 10 of those 50. Not only are they popping up all along those routes, but they typically have 10 stages instead of the normal 5.

 

3 hours ago, thebruce0 said:

And a project to fill the Trans Canada Highway is on the go, and that spans the entirety of the country.

 

2 hours ago, Max and 99 said:

We had a bunch of Route 66 adventure labs published but the rate of new ones has greatly slowed down.

 

16 minutes ago, Lynx Humble said:

If you want a lot of ALs around you I would suggest to ask Groundspeak about creating an Highway 1 AL project in Australia.

 

Hmm, if ALs are just becoming highway power trails, maybe it's a good thing then that they've died out here.

 

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On 7/1/2021 at 11:36 AM, thebruce0 said:

And a project to fill the Trans Canada Highway is on the go, and that spans the entirety of the country.

Yep. The Lincoln Highway is being covered, from San Francisco to New York.

 

On 7/1/2021 at 3:10 PM, barefootjeff said:

Hmm, if ALs are just becoming highway power trails, maybe it's a good thing then that they've died out here.

As I said, about 80% are other things, so that's not what they're all becoming. Besides, the highway ALs I've seen aren't power trails. Each stop is about an interesting thing along the route. If anything, they're a little more interesting that park ALs where the owner sometimes has trouble finding anything interesting to ask about and has to resort to "What's prohibited by this sign?" type questions.

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On 7/3/2021 at 10:57 AM, dprovan said:

 Besides, the highway ALs I've seen aren't power trails. Each stop is about an interesting thing along the route. If anything, they're a little more interesting that park ALs where the owner sometimes has trouble finding anything interesting to ask about and has to resort to "What's prohibited by this sign?" type questions.

 

You cannot possibly be serious. I did one of those "highway" ALs in our mutual neighborhood last week that was so bad I think I think I am done with ALs for good.  The stops were just things near random signs that identified the route.  Maybe one was mildly interesting.  Several others were dangerous.  And the AL was implemented so that you had no idea what you were looking for until you got close enough (with overly-tight geo-fencing) to even figure out what to look for.

 

I admit that it is possible to create good ALs, but the tools provided seem to encourage bad ones, since only one of the 6 or so I have done was enjoyable.  Geo-fencing a phone with a 10-foot radius around whatever object the person needs to seek along a busy highway with very few safe places to pull out and no way to tell from the app even which side of the road you will need to be on makes for a miserable experience.

 

IME the highway project ALs tend to be very poorly implemented and do not present  much interesting history.  But to each their own; YMMV.  I just wish that HQ could stop imposing them onto the (completely separate) geocaching activity.

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2 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

you had no idea what you were looking for until you got close enough (with overly-tight geo-fencing) ... the tools provided seem to encourage bad ones

 

I've found that the opposite is true as well --- creators set large geo-fences to compensate for the fact that they've not taken accurate coordinates at their locations. I'm not sure if it's just laziness, or thinking that "...well, the sign/bench/etc. you needed is technically within the radius, so...", but it's unbelievably frustrating. The other day, I spent five minutes looking for a sign -- A SIGN -- as part of an Adventure. It ended up being 100' from the coordinates and couldn't actually be seen from ground zero.

 

Anyways, there's that rant. I suppose I should also, you know, actually say some things about the actual thread topic too.

 

I've found that the publication rate has decreased over time. I recall Adventures appearing every other day, but now I'll only see a new one every few weeks. If there's a Trans-Canada project happening, I suppose I can look forward to that, but even still --- "interesting" locations are... sparse, especially in the interior of BC and across the prairies.

Edited by Hügh
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In early September I received an email from HQ advising that I'd been awarded another AL credit. At the time we were still in COVID lockdown so I couldn't do much more than mull over some options and do a bit of preliminary exploring around my local government area (the limit of our recreation and exercise travels), but with the restrictions now greatly eased and new caches being published again (needed for the bonus cache), I finally put it all together and set it to Public yesterday afternoon. The notification on my phone of a new Adventure almost made me jump as it's the first time it's done that since last December.

 

This is the first new AL to appear this year in the Central Coast, Lake Macquarie and Newcastle regions. Panning around on the app's map, I could only find two others in the state of New South Wales with the New Adventure gear symbol, one in southern Sydney and the other in Wagga Wagga in the state's south-west. Doing a search of Mystery caches with the Bonus Cache attribute published in NSW this year reveals 31, 3 of which aren't AL bonuses. Nine of those are in the Sydney region and the rest are scattered around the state.

 

The lack of activity here isn't just confined to creators either. My first AL, which is a pretty challenging hike, had half a dozen completions on the first day, but so far there hasn't been much of a flurry of interest in the new one:

 

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With a rain band approaching from the west which will likely hit here in a couple of hours, I guess that'll be it for today. Maybe the novelty's worn off, or maybe they're all waiting for the bonus cache to be published. As I've said in other threads, FTF races around here are generally conducted at snail's pace.

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