Monday, March 03, 2008
Geocaching Update: Archived
Since my last update, I've found two geocaches, one in Virginia and one in California. That gives me cause to update my state-by-state map:
On a sad note, for the first time, one of the physical geocaches I've found has been "archived." Lake Lure, which I found last August in Santa Barbara, is no longer an active cache. It was a fairly neat cache...it was on a utility pole in a park. You had to pull on some fishing wire wrapped around a pulley to bring a little capsule down from about 12 feet up. The capsule contained the log, which you signed, but nothing else. In October, someone notified the owners that "a portion of the cache is broken," so they disabled it and promised, "We will get out to fix this one soon." Last month, a reviewer noticed that it was still disabled and posted a note telling the owners to either fix it or archive it. Having heard nothing, the reviewer archived it today. It's no longer available for finding, and people are free to put a new cache in that area as a replacement. (Active caches have a 0.1 mile radius that prohibits other caches.)
Of the 42 caches I've found, 40 are still active. The other archived cache that I've found was the event cache, which, understandably, is no longer available for finding.
Let's take a look at where my geocoins are these days. As you'll recall, geocoins are specially minted coins that have tracking numbers. People are supposed to move them around and log their movements.
I've had a geocoin I've been waiting to place since Jan. 24, so I can't complain about any of those, but I wish they had more exciting stories to tell.
On a sad note, for the first time, one of the physical geocaches I've found has been "archived." Lake Lure, which I found last August in Santa Barbara, is no longer an active cache. It was a fairly neat cache...it was on a utility pole in a park. You had to pull on some fishing wire wrapped around a pulley to bring a little capsule down from about 12 feet up. The capsule contained the log, which you signed, but nothing else. In October, someone notified the owners that "a portion of the cache is broken," so they disabled it and promised, "We will get out to fix this one soon." Last month, a reviewer noticed that it was still disabled and posted a note telling the owners to either fix it or archive it. Having heard nothing, the reviewer archived it today. It's no longer available for finding, and people are free to put a new cache in that area as a replacement. (Active caches have a 0.1 mile radius that prohibits other caches.)
Of the 42 caches I've found, 40 are still active. The other archived cache that I've found was the event cache, which, understandably, is no longer available for finding.
Let's take a look at where my geocoins are these days. As you'll recall, geocoins are specially minted coins that have tracking numbers. People are supposed to move them around and log their movements.
- Free State Mover #1. Since September, this has traveled a grand total of 40.9 miles from the West of England into Wales. It was last spotted on January 27. On February 22, someone posted a note on the cache it's in: "Did not find. Clearly, lots of work has been going on at the site - I wonder?" So this one may be MIA.
- Free State Mover #2. Since September, this has traveled 6173.5 miles. Of that, however, 5858.4 miles were when someone took it to Kazakhstan, and then immediately brought it back to the Czech Republic, where it continued to bounce around. A Czech cacher has been holding onto it since the 23rd. It's gotten quite a tour of the Czech Republic, but doesn't seem on its way back here.
- Free State Mover #3. I put this together with the idea of leaving it in Puerto Rico or Singapore, but didn't find a suitable cache. I'll probably try to drop it off in England next month.
- Free State Generic #1. Someone picked this up on Jan. 29 and said, "Retreived [sic] to place in another MD cache". He appears to be in Florida at the moment.
- Free State Generic #2. Someone picked this up on Feb. 16 and said, "WE [sic] will move it along shortly." They don't appear to have gone geocaching since Feb. 17.
I've had a geocoin I've been waiting to place since Jan. 24, so I can't complain about any of those, but I wish they had more exciting stories to tell.
Labels: geocaching
¶ 3/03/2008 05:00:00 PM
