Geocaching Road Rally Fund Raiser

[magellan315]

Need some help with this concept:

 

A local nature conservancy that allows Geocaching, they place their own caches, wants to use Geocaching as a fund raiser in September. The idea is they have 12 parks and they will place multiple caches on each one, teams will then find the caches and drive to the next location to find more caches. One vehicle per team and they need 100 teams to raise the fund they are looking for.

 

I have an extensive background in event planning, but I need some help if anyone has done this before or has any ideas the issues are:

 

1.How do we avoid teams racing from location to location, to prevent traffic accidents.

2.Is there a way to prevent the teams from running into each other so they won't reveal the location of the cache? Almost tempted to set up the locations more like an orienteering course with a card they have to stamp.

 

Thanks

 

Feel free to e-mail me at magellan315@highstream.net

Edited March 29, 2004 by magellan315

[+Stunod]

#1) Only time them actually searching for the cache...not the driving time. They would need to check-in at the parking lot for each location and then the timer starts.

[magellan315]

Time between parks would not be timed. Bu they may still race to get the next park to have more time to cache.

 

What if we knew the average drive time between each park? They would clock out at the parking lot they leave and clock in at the next one and could not start until the drive time was complete. For example 30 minutes to drive from location to location B. If they bet there in 25 minutes they have to wait 5 minutes.

[Batonka]

#1. Have a bus or van from park to park or on a loop around all the parks. Teams get on the bus in a first arrive at checkpoint first get on basis. I know adventure races sometimes have this with public transport trains etc.

 

#2. Make the teams small or just don't worry about it. In orienteering the attitude is always: "Don't follow someone else. They might be going after a different point/on a different course". The stamp card makes sense though.

 

Batonka

[+rusty_tlc]

Need some help with this concept:

 

A local nature conservancy that allows Geocaching, they place their own caches, wants to use Geocaching as a fund raiser in September. The idea is they have 12 parks and they will place multiple caches on each one, teams will then find the caches and drive to the next location to find more caches. One vehicle per team and they need 100 teams to raise the fund they are looking for.

 

I have an extensive background in event planning, but I need some help if anyone has done this before or has any ideas the issues are:

 

1.How do we avoid teams racing from location to location, to prevent traffic accidents.

2.Is there a way to prevent the teams from running into each other so they won't reveal the location of the cache? Almost tempted to set up the locations more like an orienteering course with a card they have to stamp.

 

Thanks

 

Feel free to e-mail me at magellan315@highstream.net

You might want to add GBES Navigational Rally to your watch list.

 

Basic rally rules have penalties for completing a section of course in below the standard time. This keeps people from running the course to fast.

 

Place serveral caches at each location, assign each team a cache to find at that location.

EX:

Three checkpoints, caches A,B, and C at each checkpoint.

Team one is assigned 1;C, 2;A, 3;B

Team two is assigned 1;B, 2;C, 3;A

Team three is assigned 1;A, 2;B, 3;C

 

100 teams is pretty ambitious. Do the math for 5 Min staggered starts.

 

You will also want to look into liabilty insurance. It may be covered under the conservancy policy. Otherwise insurance will eat up most of the entry fees, or make them pretty high.

[+JohnnyVegas]

Don't have them compete in the same direction. Alternate clockwise and counter clockwist course starts with to coordinates on cards that they would have to enter into the GPS after the start. Midway caches could be very easy finds to limit the chance of teams seeing each other as they pass the half way ppint.

 

I almost forgot, you might contact a local ham radio club to provide communications so that yu can keep track of the teams, this would be a free service and ham radio clubs have members that provide communications for events like this.

Edited March 30, 2004 by JohnnyVegas