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Honoring a cacher?


SamLowrey

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Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher?   I know of one who has put out a lot of hides (~ 1000).  I've watched a few and he has expressed his frustration at the lazy logs left behind.  Naturally, the very people who do that aren't going to read the previous logs in the first place. 

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13 minutes ago, SamLowrey said:

Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher?   I know of one who has put out a lot of hides (~ 1000).  I've watched a few and he has expressed his frustration at the lazy logs left behind.  Naturally, the very people who do that aren't going to read the previous logs in the first place. 

I would think the best way to honor him would be to write really nice logs for his caches that you find.

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3 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

I would think the best way to honor him would be to write really nice logs for his caches that you find.

I have done so and even reached out to him through the message system to tell him how valued he is.  He answered back very kindly.  He still writes occasional sour notes on his caches to address others how he wishes people took more time to write logs.   

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7 hours ago, SamLowrey said:

 I know of one who has put out a lot of hides (~ 1000).  I've watched a few and he has expressed his frustration at the lazy logs left behind.

I have a hard time believing there exist hiders able to hide and maintain thousand(!) caches and all of the caches deserve nice and individual logs. But what do I know.... :rolleyes:

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2 hours ago, Hynz said:

I have a hard time believing there exist hiders able to hide and maintain thousand(!) caches and all of the caches deserve nice and individual logs. But what do I know.... :rolleyes:

 

He has put out that many.  I would say half or less that are still active.  He does maintain them but if they aren't working out he lets them go.  Many are cemetery caches.  Most have some description of a famous/historical person.  Maybe half regular/small and the rest bison tubes.  Over 2000 favorite points, for all his caches.  

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Like Max and 99, we've found the best way is to leave a thoughtful, kind log works best.   :)

We've had around a dozen "honor" caches placed in our name, and not a single one was an ammo can. 

Other than our first cache (size was determined by the township...),  all I've placed were all ammo cans.

The other 2/3rds had a couple micros and smalls, but hers were mostly ammo cans too.

 - Having a film can placed behind a fence in a busy, small park, when you usually stick to woods...I appreciate the thought, but...  :D

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6 hours ago, SamLowrey said:

 

He has put out that many.  I would say half or less that are still active.  He does maintain them but if they aren't working out he lets them go.  Many are cemetery caches.  Most have some description of a famous/historical person.  Maybe half regular/small and the rest bison tubes.  Over 2000 favorite points, for all his caches.  

 

Cachers are a broad community with lots of different interests. For me, I don't find famous/historical person caches particularly appealing, whereas anyone looking at my hides would probably conclude I have a penchant for long hikes, waterfalls and sandstone caves, things a cacher with young kids would likely want to avoid. I particularly don't like well-concealed micros in busy urban environments or tree-climbs but I know other cachers who thrive on them. If a cache resonates with someone's interests it'll probably get a long appreciative log from them, but if it doesn't it likely won't.

 

Without wishing to sound disrespectful, I'd also note that 2000 FPs across 1000 hides is only an average of 2 FPs per hide, but that's probably not a good measure as often a series of caches along a trail only get one FP for the lot even if all the caches are pretty good.

 

 

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10 hours ago, Hynz said:

I have a hard time believing there exist hiders able to hide and maintain thousand(!) caches and all of the caches deserve nice and individual logs. But what do I know.... :rolleyes:

I'm not sure why it's so hard to imagine. It doesn't take much time to hide a cache, and a dedicated hider has a pipeline of containers ready for any time he discovers a good place. If the caches are quality containers hidden in the right places, they'd require very little maintenance, and if he's friends with the most active cachers in his area, they'll call to offer help if they find one with a problem. In short, there's no reason to think someone with 1000 caches would have caches any less interesting than someone with 10 caches. And, indeed, I find it's often just the opposite: someone with 10 hides is typically just hiding caches because they think they should, while someone with hundreds of hides knows what to look for to make a cache interesting and doesn't bother hiding a mundane cache because he'd consider it a waste of his time.

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2 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

Without wishing to sound disrespectful, I'd also note that 2000 FPs across 1000 hides is only an average of 2 FPs per hide, but that's probably not a good measure as often a series of caches along a trail only get one FP for the lot even if all the caches are pretty good.

You make a good point, but the number of FPs was cited to support the notion that this CO hides generally good caches that often deserve thorough logs, not to prove that every single one of his caches was outstanding. In that context, an average of 2 FPs for each cache is fairly respectable.

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4 hours ago, dprovan said:

I'm not sure why it's so hard to imagine. It doesn't take much time to hide a cache, and a dedicated hider has a pipeline of containers ready for any time he discovers a good place. If the caches are quality containers hidden in the right places, they'd require very little maintenance, and if he's friends with the most active cachers in his area, they'll call to offer help if they find one with a problem. In short, there's no reason to think someone with 1000 caches would have caches any less interesting than someone with 10 caches. And, indeed, I find it's often just the opposite: someone with 10 hides is typically just hiding caches because they think they should, while someone with hundreds of hides knows what to look for to make a cache interesting and doesn't bother hiding a mundane cache because he'd consider it a waste of his time.

 

In the whole of Australia there are only two accounts with 1000 or more active caches and one of those is a group account that looks after some outback power trails in South Australia. There's also only another twelve with 500 or more active caches. In my local region (encompassing 1681 square kilometres) there are only about 500 caches and, although we don't have any power trails and very few parking lot caches, not all are in awesome locations. I'm currently the most prolific hider in the region with 42 caches (plus another 3 outside my region), and while I'll likely hide some more in the years ahead, I'm probably approaching an equilibrium point where my hide rate and archival rate become equal.

 

I'm having a hard time imaging how someone could hide 1000 caches within the allowed distance from home without resorting to power trails or large geoart constructions, and if they do create those they shouldn't expect to get long appreciative logs on every cache. Even if they've been in the game for 20 years, that's still an average of almost one cache a week. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're creating awesome-enough caches to legitimately complain about the logs you're getting, they're probably going to take more than a week each to conceive and put together.

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3 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm having a hard time imaging how someone could hide 1000 caches within the allowed distance from home without resorting to power trails or large geoart constructions, and if they do create those they shouldn't expect to get long appreciative logs on every cache. Even if they've been in the game for 20 years, that's still an average of almost one cache a week. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're creating awesome-enough caches to legitimately complain about the logs you're getting, they're probably going to take more than a week each to conceive and put together.

Thanks, you put it in much better words than I have done.

 

9 hours ago, dprovan said:

In short, there's no reason to think someone with 1000 caches would have caches any less interesting than someone with 10 caches.

You must definitely have another definition of "interesting" than I have :rolleyes:

But I certainly agree that placing uninteresting caches is not bound to high number owners.

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10 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

I'm having a hard time imaging how someone could hide 1000 caches within the allowed distance from home without resorting to power trails or large geoart constructions, and if they do create those they shouldn't expect to get long appreciative logs on every cache. Even if they've been in the game for 20 years, that's still an average of almost one cache a week. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're creating awesome-enough caches to legitimately complain about the logs you're getting, they're probably going to take more than a week each to conceive and put together.

OK. I have to admit, "one thousand" isn't really a number I'm familiar with but there are several cachers in my area with more than 500, and they're reliably better maintained and more fun to find than the average geocache. I'm not sure why that doesn't happen in your area. Perhaps my cache density is higher, so the COs' caches aren't as far flung as they are in your area.

 

6 hours ago, Hynz said:

You must definitely have another definition of "interesting" than I have 

I suppose that must be true. My definition of "interesting" is "better than most other caches". After all, the question we're implicitly discussing is whether our geocache environment would be better or worse if high volume COs didn't hide any more caches. In my area, at least, the geocache biome would be significantly worse without those 500+ COs hiding additional caches. Not only are their caches themselves good contributions, their example creates a culture of higher quality hides.

 

But, of course, if you only think geocaches on nice hikes into the country are interesting, then you wouldn't like many these COs' caches -- (although, as it happens, in my area, these COs hide more trail caches than anyone else, too) -- but I think that's more your preference than anything that makes it impossible for a CO to manage a large number of caches.

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4 hours ago, dprovan said:

OK. I have to admit, "one thousand" isn't really a number I'm familiar with but there are several cachers in my area with more than 500, and they're reliably better maintained and more fun to find than the average geocache. I'm not sure why that doesn't happen in your area. Perhaps my cache density is higher, so the COs' caches aren't as far flung as they are in your area.

 

I guess something along the lines of what you're describing would be the Dog's Head Trail north of Maitland (about 140km from home) which has 215 caches placed along a series of rural roads that form the shape of a dog's head and where each cache (some of them 3D-printed) is themed to a breed of dog.

 

image.png.7f5d2989a0b7dd2b2c598eb4fdb732e1.png

 

I haven't done any of them as they're outside my normal caching travel range, but the CO is quite active in his community and from all accounts the caches are well-made and well-maintained, but even so, just the nature of it being a power trail, some of the logs he gets are pretty minimal and most only have one or two FPs.

 

My busiest day was 22 finds made while attending the Oz Geomuster mega in 2018, most of which were along one of the geoart trails created for the mega. They weren't bad caches, but even so I was struggling to come up with something original and worthwhile to say in my logs on each one and by the end I was resorting to something pretty generic like this:

 

image.png.9efbcdb6beca31fafa9fadcf6b261ea7.png

 

which I guess would leave the CO mentioned at the start of this thread shaking his head in despair. I can only imagine what it'd be like trying to write creative logs on a 500-cache trail.

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52 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

which I guess would leave the CO mentioned at the start of this thread shaking his head in despair. I can only imagine what it'd be like trying to write creative logs on a 500-cache trail.

 

Every single one of my logs is unique.  I tend to avoid power trails, but I have done a couple.  For those, I wrote a long (2500-word) description of the entire journey, and then built a program that split it up into pieces, each of which was entered as a log with a link to the next piece.  If I had something else to say about a particular stage, I added it later.

 

As a result, my logs:

  • Were unique for each cache
  • Were short, but not too short
  • Contained no repetitive boilerplate
  • Made a narrative that, read end-to-end, contained interesting details about the entire hunt

I know that others say that power-trail caches don't deserve unique logs, but I have put on myself the requirement that all my logs are original and unique.  Not claiming I am better than anyone else, but just putting my methodology out there.  For an example, see my logs starting here.

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I tend to write unique logs for unique caches. Run of the mill, cookie cutter, caches tend to get simple, "Found it. Thanks!" logs. 

 

If anyone's interested ProjectGC has a couple of stats for logging. 

 

2021-10-14_154737.jpg.aedbaa14c24b758d67a8c9b46ff8733c.jpg

For log similarity, the higher the percentage the more similar your logs are. A lower percentage means more different/unique logs. 

A shortest log of zero, probably indicates a log that consists of nothing but emoticons. 

 

I'd still like to know who the OP wants to honor. 

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On 10/13/2021 at 12:39 AM, SamLowrey said:

Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher?   I know of one who has put out a lot of hides (~ 1000).  I've watched a few and he has expressed his frustration at the lazy logs left behind.  Naturally, the very people who do that aren't going to read the previous logs in the first place. 

 

Logs have a way of becoming less interesting over time on caches.  In the beginning you'll get excited cachers who found the cache and have some story to tell, and over time you get people writing quick "found it" logs (or worse).  When you hide a cache, the logs are out of your control, and you have to accept that.  People write logs the way they write logs.  You get what you get and you don't get upset.

 

If the cacher is upset because he isn't getting enough recognition in his logs for being such a great cache hider (and I've seen that before), that's a different issue.  

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12 minutes ago, GeoElmo6000 said:

Logs have a way of becoming less interesting over time on caches.  In the beginning you'll get excited cachers who found the cache and have some story to tell, and over time you get people writing quick "found it" logs (or worse).  When you hide a cache, the logs are out of your control, and you have to accept that.  People write logs the way they write logs.  You get what you get and you don't get upset.

 

Yes, not only less interesting but less intelligible. This is the most recent log on GC6P7WN which was published in 2016 and has accrued 9 FPs from 23 finds:

 

image.png.d784e7d6f64edd739317ec458bc07dcb.png

 

This cache, a part of my Chasing Waterfalls series, is a 7-stage multi taking in a large sandstone cave, an unusual rock formation, a waterfall (of course), potholes and a pool:

 

Collage.thumb.jpg.d432814be39872a9b7b05d87191251f7.jpg

 

The earlier finders did indeed have a bit more to say about their adventure than just "easy dubs" (whatever that means), but if a cache like this is just another ho-hum smiley to someone then so be it, at least it's better than getting no finds at all.

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On 10/12/2021 at 9:39 PM, SamLowrey said:

Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher? 

 

Highlighting the contibutions of a cacher, meaning calling attention to the number of caches he has hidden and the quality of the caches, is a separate issue from the way he feels about the logs people leave on those caches.  As a hider, I enjoy reading the logs I get when people express the fun they had finding the cache, or solving the puzzle.  I also get TFTC, or Got it.  No story, just a smilie and they are on their way.  I can't control what other cachers are going to write in their logs, no matter how much effort I put into the hide or the write up in the description.

 

As far as highlighting his caches or his contributions, I've seen "tribute trails" where each cache along the trail names aspecific local hider, and the caches hidden are "in the style of" a typical hide by said cachers.  You, or others can hold an event for his birthday, or to commemmorate his first hide, and celebrate the number of years he has given to hiding caches for others to find.  

 

I try to write interesting logs for those caches I find interesting, and at least a bit more than TFTC for any cache that I find.  After a dozen or so finds, I'm usually done caching for that day anyway, so it's not hard to sit down and write good logs for my caching days.

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9 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

 

I have put on myself the requirement that all my logs are original and unique.  Not claiming I am better than anyone else, but just putting my methodology out there.  For an example, see my logs starting here.

Thanks for telling your way. Writing only unique logs is also my personal requirement when heading out. But I'm basically refusing to search for caches along trails where the only way to manage it is splitting up a longer text.

 

Looking at your example may I suggest that you link not to the cache but to your log. Otherwise it's almost impossible to read your adventure.

I've done a similar thing (linking my logs forward and backward) following a set of hiking multis forming together a longer trail. See here: https://coord.info/GLNXB2HY

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29 minutes ago, Hynz said:

Thanks for telling your way. Writing only unique logs is also my personal requirement when heading out. But I'm basically refusing to search for caches along trails where the only way to manage it is splitting up a longer text.

 

Looking at your example may I suggest that you link not to the cache but to your log. Otherwise it's almost impossible to read your adventure.

I've done a similar thing (linking my logs forward and backward) following a set of hiking multis forming together a longer trail. See here: https://coord.info/GLNXB2HY

 

Unfortunately, you cannot link to the next log because that log does not exist.  I suppose I could have written a second pass to update all the logs, but unless done by hand it would violate the TOS.

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On 10/14/2021 at 2:22 PM, barefootjeff said:

I guess something along the lines of what you're describing would be the Dog's Head Trail north of Maitland (about 140km from home) which has 215 caches placed along a series of rural roads that form the shape of a dog's head and where each cache (some of them 3D-printed) is themed to a breed of dog.

The quality might be the same, but the cachers I'm thinking of haven't put out any power trails. Each cache is as unique as any other CO's

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On 10/12/2021 at 11:39 PM, SamLowrey said:

Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher?   I know of one who has put out a lot of hides (~ 1000).  I've watched a few and he has expressed his frustration at the lazy logs left behind.  Naturally, the very people who do that aren't going to read the previous logs in the first place. 

 

Maybe nominate him as "Cacher of the Month" or to the Hall of Fame of your State Geocaching Association. 

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On 10/13/2021 at 6:39 AM, SamLowrey said:

Is there a good way to highlight the contributions of a cacher?

A few examples that happened to me and which I was very happy about:

- Support in building new caches.

- maintenance support, especially for remote caches.

- invitation to a dinner. 

- Invitation to use a vacation home for a weekend free of charge.

Greetings Johannis10

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1 hour ago, Johannis10 said:

A few examples that happened to me and which I was very happy about:

- Support in building new caches.

- maintenance support, especially for remote caches.

- invitation to a dinner. 

- Invitation to use a vacation home for a weekend free of charge.

Greetings Johannis10

 

If I was the recipient, I'm not sure I'd be too pleased about the first two. For me, a lot of the fun in creating a new cache is coming up with the ideas and putting it all together, with its ultimate publication almost feeling like an anticlimax, and looking after my caches, especially the more remote ones, is something I enjoy doing. On Sunday I ventured out to what is probably my toughest cache to access, a T4 that's a steep climb then a few hundred metres of thick scrub to battle through to its panoramic cliff-top location, then yesterday I took the ferry across the bay to Palm Beach and did the climb up Barrenjoey Headland to check on my two adopted caches there. I enjoyed both walks, I needed the exercise after almost four months of COVID lockdown, and would much rather do that myself than sit around at home while someone else did those checks.

 

The dinner, though, would be great, I'm never one to knock back a meal with friends :).

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51 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

If I was the recipient, I'm not sure I'd be too pleased about the first two.

You can also make a couple of suggestions and then ask what he would be most happy about.

Once someone offered me money to support expensive cache maintenance. That was very nice, but I was honest and told him that at the moment I would rather be happy about a few hours, or days of work support in order to be able to finish a cache on time. Then he brought someone with him and they dragged heavy stones for the masonry and helped with the building. That was really great.

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