Counties!

[+jkn1151]

My husband and I would like to find a geocache in every county in Colorado, USA.  Where do we find information about what county a cache is in?

[+Max and 99]

39 minutes ago, jkn1151 said:

My husband and I would like to find a geocache in every county in Colorado, USA.  Where do we find information about what county a cache is in?

I know there are way more high-tech ways to do it, but I just look at a state county map and then on the geocaching app or website I see what city the cache is near and the shape of the county to match up with the map.

Also a challenge cache to find every county in Colorado will tell you which counties you have, so you know which ones are missing. 

 

https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC8DT6G

Edited June 5 by Max and 99

[Keystone]

Several Geocaching Live API partners offer help here, because counties are not captured directly in the Geocaching.com database, but the county information can be derived based on a cache's coordinates.

 

Because you're a premium member, you can construct a database in GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) that has all the caches in Colorado.  You can sort and filter on counties in many possible ways.  Here's a screenshot from my own Colorado cache database, filtered to show just the caches in Summit County (the location of one of my favorite geocaching trips):

 

 

You can also view County information in project-gc.com without having to go through the effort of building your own offline database.  However, you need to be a paying member of project-gc.com.  Here is the Map Counties tool from that site, again filtered for Summit County.  I zoomed out a little to show the color coding - green for counties where the account has already found a cache, and red for counties with no cache finds yet.  Both GSAK and project-gc are immensely helpful planning tools for people who love "coloring in counties," as I do.

 

[+Smitherington]

The county borders are now shown on the Geocaching app on my phone. I have to choose the ‘Trails’ map which is a premium feature.  So it is easy to see where the cache is in relation to the county borders.

 

With Project GC I can look at the maps under my stats and see which counties I have already found a cache.  The map below shows the state of Georgia.

 

 

.

[Keystone]

Also, here's a screenshot from project-gc.com, zoomed out to show all of Colorado so it's easy for me to see which counties I still need to visit:

 

[+JL_HSTRE]

There's a way to simplify your work.

 

Figure out what places you want to go in Colorado even if you weren't filling your county map. Old caches, highly favorited caches, state parks, Virtuals, museums, mountain peaks, whatever. The places you would cache even if you weren't grid-filling, and would go even if you weren't geocaching.

 

You will probably find that going the places you would want to go anyway will get you most of the counties. Passive grid-filling. Perhaps in only 10 or 20 out of Colorado's 64 counties will you need to actively figure out what cache will check off that box.

 

 

Edited June 5 by JL_HSTRE
typo

[+Smitherington]

I did passive grid filling (I like the term) for a long time.  Then somehow I started seeing the county map stats and another personal challenge got me out of my chair.  I now have all the counties in 7 states and all the provinces in Costa Rica.  
 

Like JL_HSTRE said, going for the caches you normally want to find takes you a long way toward the County goal but I have encountered counties with very few options and a simple guardrail cache may have to do.  At least one of the dark counties on my Georgia map had only one cache so I have found 100% of the caches in the county and the color intensity reflects that fact.

 

Good luck & enjoy.

[+JL_HSTRE]

1 hour ago, Smitherington said:

At least one of the dark counties on my Georgia map had only one cache

 

And it's a caboose hide, which can be very difficult for some of us.

[+Smitherington]

Actually I was thinking of another one but I don’t want to give away the host which is not nearly as large as a caboose.

[+HHL]

This might be of interest for you (click here for county caching)

 

Hans

Edited June 7 by HHL
typo

[Keystone]

Thanks for posting that great link, @HHL.  The blog article reminded me of something:  "With Project-GC’s script installed on a web browser, county information can be visible on cache pages."  I've had this installed for so long, I forgot it wasn't native to the website!  Here is a screenshot showing how the cache page looks for Colorado's oldest cache, with the Project-GC script installed.  I highlighted the added features in yellow (and I blacked out the "distance from home" info).  One of those helpful features:  when you view any cache page, it tells you what County that cache is in.

 

 

[+JL_HSTRE]

10 hours ago, Keystone said:

The blog article reminded me of something:  "With Project-GC’s script installed on a web browser, county information can be visible on cache pages."  I've had this installed for so long, I forgot it wasn't native to the website!

 

How does one get this browser script? Does it require Project GC membership?