This Month:

• Numbers Game:By Jerry Carter aka El Diablo
• Every Cache Under the Sun: By Christina Raving aka Huntnlady

Geocaching has become a numbers game, whether we like it or not. Long ago, Geocaching.com took a stance against numbers and keeping score, but, at the same time, they provided all the tools necessary to track them...Regardless as to how Geocaching.com feels about this being a competitive sport, it will always be so. It is in the human nature to compete. In all likelihood, it is the competition that has made this game/hobby/sport as popular as it is today. For a sport/hobby/game that was born just a mere four years ago, the rate of speed at which it has grown is absolutely mind-boggling. When I joined in June of 2001, there were about 10,000 active geocachers. Today, just three short years later, that number has grown to an estimated 500,000 cachers around the world! I still remember being in awe back then that there were 10,000 people doing this.

Cachers that had found a hundred or more caches were regarded as god-like. If you had logged a hundred caches, then, chances were, you had cached in several different states. It wasn't uncommon to travel a hundred miles or better to log a new cache that had popped up. Today, you can log a thousand caches in a hundred-mile area. People today are held in awe when they log a thousand caches or more. It won't be too far in the future that it will take ten thousand logged caches to gain the same respect.

If you did a cache search three years ago, you would have found five caches in the area, with about the same number of cachers. They were all traditional caches. The area of which I speak is Greensboro, NC, which has a metropolitan population of well over five hundred thousand people. The first event we held brought in three people, the second event brought in fifteen, and it was considered a great turn out. Today, if you held an event and forty people showed up, you would wonder where everyone was.

Soon, the virtual caches and locationless caches started gaining in popularity around the world. It wasn't long afterwards that, if you saw a school bus, fire department, flag pole, airport, or the forever-famous yellow jeep, etc., you could log a locationless cache. The virtual caches were mainly in good taste. They took you to areas that were beautiful to visit, but it wasn't possible to place a physical cache due to land management restrictions. Then, they also became a part of the numbers game. Soon after, you could log a virtual cache at every park statue, roadside marker, and Dairy Queen in the area.

Then, along came the fastest growing cache of today, the dreaded micro. I say dreaded because they can be extremely hard to find. The micro cache was born out of the desire to place a cache, but all the local parks and hiking trails were already teeming with the old, traditional caches, which had grown so fast that they took up every nook and cranny of the local parks and hiking trails. You could sit on one cache while you logged another. Sadly, part of the sport/hobby/game fell victim to the numbers game once again. The original micros were very creative. Now, you can find them in parking lots of your local Wal-Mart or even on the dumpster behind it.

Geocaching has become a numbers game, whether we like it or not. Long ago, Geocaching.com took a stance against numbers and keeping score, but, at the same time, they provided all the tools necessary to track them (I'm still trying to figure this one out). Regardless as to how Geocaching.com feels about this being a competitive sport, it will always be so. It is in the human nature to compete. In all likelihood, it is the competition that has made this game/hobby/sport as popular as it is today.

The obsession for numbers is not restricted to the caches themselves, but has spilled over into the forums. In the old days, you could go to the forums and get useful information. Today, you need a lot of patience to sift through all the garbage to find anything useful. Once again, it is another part of caching that has fallen victim to the numbers game. There are people in the forums who post to every topic with nothing useful to say. Their only purpose is to drive up the number of posts that show under their names, and, once again, Geocaching.com provides the tools to accomplish this. There are people in the forums with a high number of posts that actually do provide great information, but they are a minority. So, is this sport/hobby/game about going to places you would have never gone before, and getting outdoors and being with family and friends, or is it a numbers game?