ILReviewer 10 Year Coin: Coin Number 1

Celebrate Geocaching in Illinois
 

On May 16 2003, I accepted the nomination to become a local volunteer for the Geocaching.com website. At the time, my login was "ILAdmin" (later changed to "ILReviewer"), and I spent a great deal of time reviewing each and every geocache published in the state of Illinois. For the most part, cachers were understanding and appreciative of the hours I spent volunteering to make sure that caches not only upheld to Groundspeak's guidelines, but also to the guidelines of local land managers. However, I knew from other volunteers that sometimes cachers were problematic in their communication, so I chose a separate account from my main caching account to conduct reviewing activity, complete with a separate email account.

Around late 2006, new cache reviewing was becoming overwhelming for me to keep up and family matters changed, so I took a brief hiatus for a few weeks. In the meantime, other reviewers were recruited to Illinois to pick up the work I had done. On the fourth anniversary of becoming a volunteer, I made the decision that publishing caches was too time consuming of an endeavor for my volunteer work, and stepped back from that portion of the volunteering, with the last cache being published on March 22, 2007. Since then I've published an event, one "regular" publication to mess with people's minds, and 9 caches in New Mexico on April 1, 2012 (a practical joke for reviewers to switch up reviewing territories).

But I continue my volunteer work as the local reviewer monitoring caches disabled for longer-than-usual durations, monitoring "Needs Archived" logs for Illinois, and checking on events that are long passed and haven't been archived. To date, I've posted:

• 3,205 "Temporary Disable" logs
• 7,223 "Archive" logs
• 9,407 "Reivewer Notes"
• 294 "Unarchive" logs
• 150 "Notes"
• 53 "Enable Listing" logs and
• 25 "Update Coordinate" logs

...all in an effort to help the caching community have well-maintained caches available to find when they hit the trails.

In 2014 to commemorate my 10th anniversary, Groundspeak gave me a plaque, T-Shirt, and some nifty "Ten Year Anniversary" coins that have been sitting in my desk, waiting for an opportunity to go out into the caching world. May 2 2015 seemed like a good time to release these coins:

• It's the 15th anniversary of the release of Selective Availability (making geocaching possible)
• It's close to the 12th anniversary of my becoming a community volunteer
• It's approximately one year after I received the coins and started looking for a way to distribute them

So - Illinois Community - thanks for maintaining your caches, thanks for responding to my logs in a cordial manner, with acknowledging that the cache will be cleaned up or archived, and thanks for helping me to keep the caches ready for everyone to find.