Groundspeak Weekly Newsletter – July 13, 2011

A First Look at “Geocaching in Deutschland”

Take a sneak peek into the new Geocaching.com international video series! Watch this trailer to see some of the Terrain 5 thrills and night caching adventures that are available in Germany. The country holds the distinction of posting twice as many night caches as any other country in the world. The innovative German geocaching community also enjoys thousands of Terrain 5 caches and a choice of more than 185,000 active geocaches.
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The “Geocaching in Deutschland” trailer includes heart-racing scenes from more than ten separate stories. The videos will be released one by one in the coming months. English viewers, select Closed Captioning (CC) to view English subtitles. The first video in our “Geocaching in Deutschland” series will be available at the end of July in the Videos section of Geocaching.com.

Quality Geocaches

In 11 years, geocaching has grown from a single container in the woods of Oregon to an international activity with over 5 million participants and more than 1.4 million geocaches. In the last week alone, Groundspeak Volunteer Reviewers published nearly 6000 caches. Wow. Thanks, Reviewers!

This rapid growth means that almost anywhere in the world, you can walk out your door and find a geocache within an hour. But it also means that geocache saturation is increasing. In some areas, it is becoming difficult to find a location to place a cache.

As the number of geocachers and geocaches grows, we encourage you to make sure that each and every cache you place is of good quality. We know that everyone has a different opinion as to what makes a “quality hide,” but there are some steps that you can take to make sure that others will enjoy your cache:

• Find many caches before hiding one of your own. This will show you how vastly different geocaches can be. We suggest finding at least 20-25.

• Think about your favorite geocaches and why you enjoyed them so much. Was it the location? The container? The story on the cache page? Try to replicate the elements that you enjoyed while adding some of your own creativity.

• Make sure that the geocache container is waterproof and will survive the elements. It is better to use a sealed container rather than a plastic bag.

• Maintain your geocache. This means replacing the logbook when it is full, checking on the cache every so often to see that it’s still doing well and responding quickly to “needs maintenance” logs.

You can see which geocaches others recommend by looking at the number of Favorite Points that each cache has received. Favorite Points can be found on each cache page and in the search results list. Premium Members can award 1 Favorite Point for each 10 caches that they find and can sort the search results list by most-favorited caches.