Category: Community

Geocaching is delightful because of the people who play it — adventure-seekers, makers, parents, astronauts and (sometimes) celebrities. Read their stories.

/ Eric Schudiske /

“Triglav 2864” GC14N3H GEOCACHE OF THE WEEK – February 27, 2012

Logging Triglav 2864

Learning some quick Slovenian may smooth your long hike to reach this Geocache of the Week. The cache page for “Triglav 2864” (GC14N3H) shares a couple Slovenian phrases to offer other your fellow hikers as a courtesy. It reads, “When you meet or pass somebody say ‘dober dan’ (good day) or ‘zdravo or zivjo’ (hello).”

Geocachers may also need the phrase, “How far to the top?” The  difficulty 1.5, terrain 4.5 geocache sits high atop a Mt. Triglav. The hike to the geocache and back can take two days.

The peak of Mt. Triglav reaches 2864m (9390 ft) into the cool central European air. The mountain is highest in all of Slovenia and graces the country’s flag.

Geocachers are advised to bring safety gear for the aggressive terrain and extra clothing to adapt to the shifting weather on the mountain. The cache page offers this warning, “Never underestimate the extremes of mountain weather. Check the weather forecast before you go and plan and equip accordingly.”

View from near the cache location

Hikers plan their trips  months in advance. The best time to climb begins in July. More than two hundred geocachers have taken the challenge to find “Triglav 2864” since TeMpL Team hide the traditional cache in 2007.

Some geocachers say they overcame fears to find this cache, “So far the hardest cache. I am very glad that I finally decided to [go] up. I do not like heights too, so for me it was a really powerful experience. We had nice weather and it was a very nice view. Thanks for a nice, big cache.”

Continue to explore some of the most engaging geocaches around the globe. Check out all the Geocaches of the Week on the Latitude 47 blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com.

Cache container

If you’ d like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, send an email with your name, comments, the name of the geocache, and the GC code to pr@groundspeak.com.

 

/ Eric Schudiske /

New Geocaching.com Maps

We are the .35%

A few months ago, Google announced a change to its Maps API licensing structure that requires third-party websites with over 25,000 map loads per day to pay for use of the API. (Visit Google for more details on their pricing structure.) According to Google the new limits should affect only around .35% of maps consumers. Geocaching.com averages about 2,000,000 map loads per day, placing us firmly within that small percentage of affected consumers.

After discussing available options, we made the difficult decision to reduce our reliance on Google Maps and take steps to better integrate Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. This decision was based, in large part, on our ability to bear the very significant cost of licensing Google maps given our high rate of consumption. It was also based on the advantage we gain in many ways using new tools that allow us to grow our technology and the service we provide.

OpenStreetMap Benefits – Enter the Rainbows

and Unicorns

Creative Commons, Community Driven, Constantly Updated

OpenStreetMap is freely and publicly editable in a similar way as Wikipedia. Anyone can change or add to the maps and thousands of people worldwide contribute on a regular basis. As a result, the maps are constantly improving, and as a community we can grow the map database while we geocache.

What happens when a large number of passionate people pull in the same direction? Well, geocaching, for one. Our passionate community grew this hobby from one geocache to more than 1.6 million.

OSM Maps are Good

While OpenStreetMap is known widely in Europe, much of the rest of the world is unfamiliar with the mapping software. OSM maps accurately represent location, not only at the street level but also at the level of buildings and infrastructure. Even walking paths in many parks are included. Here is one comparison showing the level of detail provided.

Google Map of Discovery Park
OpenStreetMap of Discovery Park

*Note the dotted-line trails depicted in the OpenStreetMap example. These are hiking trails contributed by Open Street Maps users and are refined on a continuous basis.

New features

Leaflet, the lightweight JavaScript library for tile-based interactive maps, is replacing our current Google implementation. It provides us with more flexibility to offer features that previously had not been possible.  Including:

  • Support for tablets like the iPad and other mobile devices
  • Display of only the caches in a Pocket Query instead of all caches at once
  • Faster tooltips, at any zoom level

We also intend to build out our own tile server in the future which will speed up the loading of map tiles enormously.

Moving Forward

We remain committed to providing great mapping resources to our customers and believe that both the global geocaching community and our website benefit from this change. With ongoing innovation and new technologies being developed every day, geocaching will continue to evolve.

We have certainly come along way. Here is a glimpse of our old maps (circa 2005):

Oh the horror!

You can check out the new maps here.

/ Eric Schudiske /

Geocaching.com Presents: Love Stories

[Click CC for English Subtitles]

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Happy Valentine’s Day from Geocaching.com. Get lost in geocaching love! Watch three new Geocaching.com Presents videos about discovering more than just a cache while geocaching. See how the adventure of geocaching brings couples together.

Hear stories about dates involving rappelling for geocaches and weddings listed as Geocaching.com Event Caches. At the end of the video, continue the geocaching love story with another video, and another video. You even have the option to see a great way to propose with geocaching.

Subscribe to the official Geocaching.com YouTube channel to be one of the first to see new videos about the evolving world of geocaching. Watch the more than 50 videos produced by Geocaching.com on our video page.

/ Eric Schudiske /

Tsaagan Subarga GC1DPJV – GEOCACHE OF THE WEEK – February 13, 2012

View from near the cache location

There are few locations on earth where the nearest geocache is more than one hundred kilometers away. You’re looking at one of those rare locations.

Tsaagan Subarga (GC1DPJV) is cradled in the heart of the Gobi Desert. It’s reachable by reliable vehicle or on the back of a camel or horse. The cache is named after the striking location. It’s known for the red, pink, yellow, and white stripes in the rock formations.

Wild Boy hid the cache in 2008 and has arranged for a local cache guardian to perform maintenance when he’s not in Mongolia.  The difficulty 1, terrain 1.5 cache still has fewer than ten finds.

Four geocachers discovered the cache in 2011. One writes, ” I found it with my tour group on our 6th day in the Gobi desert. Our cook and driver were impressed to find this in the desert!! The cache is still in good shape and there’s a lot of places in the logbook.”

FTF on "Tsaagna Subarga"

Looks like there’s room for your name on the Tsagaan Subarga logbook. Have you ever claimed a smiley for a geocache in the desert before?

Continue to explore some of the most engaging geocaches around the globe. Check out all the Geocaches of the Week on the Latitude 47 blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com.

If you’ d like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, send an email with your name, comments, the name of the geocache, and the GC code to pr@groundspeak.com.

/ Eric Schudiske /

Thar She Blows! GC4ADE GEOCACHE OF THE WEEK – February 21, 2012

Thar She Blows!

Geocaching reveals a world that’s often hidden to others. Take ‘Thar She Blows!’ (GC4ADE) in Oklahoma, USA for example.

American motorists, since the 1920’s, zipped along a famous stretch of road know as Route 66.  The highway connected the growing country to the West Coast. The prominence and popularity of Route 66 rose as the country grew.

That all changed in the 1950’s as the U.S. Interstate system gradually made Route 66 obsolete. But geocachers can still discover a little remembered tourist stop. ‘Thar She Blows!’ delivers geocachers to an unexpected site – a blue whale wading in a small pond. The difficulty two, terrain one geocache was hidden by Golden Retrievers in 2002. It has been rewarded with more than 40 Favorite Points so far.

One geocacher who logged a smiley on the cache writes, “What an excellent roadside attraction. We were going to Tulsa today anyway, and the weather was quite nice, so we thought – ‘hey, why not go see a big blue whale?’ …. Assigning a favorite point because this is just so unusual and off the wall.”

Thar She Blows!

Continue to explore some of the most engaging geocaches around the globe. Check out all the Geocaches of the Week on the Latitude 47 blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com.

If you’ d like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, send an email with your name, comments, the name of the geocache, and the GC code to pr@groundspeak.com.