J H/TEAM 360 wrote:
> I am self-imposing a limited lifespan on my physical caches. They will be pulled and archived after a set amount of time passes, in order that I may keep my hiding techniques fresh and offer the local cachers the continuous challenges of new finds. Additionally, this move will keep any environmental damage around a site to a minimum.

I always worried that the more people that cached, the more traffic to 
the caches, and therefore more and more damage.
Then I started paying attention to the graphs and noticing that traffic 
to the caches seems to always stay steady and in most cases even slowed 
down, and if you look at the trend of the growth of caches vs cachers,
( http://www.azgeocaching.com/cache_growth.html ) they mirror each other 
almost exactly, so no matter how many cachers we get, as long as people 
keep hiding caches like we have been, there will be very little damage 
to the sites.  Also, for the most part, the more out in the boon docs a 
cache is the more likely it WON'T be visited as much, but those are more 
likely to the be caches that people would want to be protecting the area 
the most, so the landscape has a natural limiting factor.

The graphs on azgeocaching.com can be very missleading because the 
ALWAYS go up.  This causes some people that don't look long enough to 
actually understand the graphs to think that the traffic to the caches 
is increasing at a steady rate, when in reality if the line in straight, 
that people are coming at a steady rate from day one.
Now if everyone did like you are suggesting, then there would be a HUGE 
decrease in the number of caches and a HUGE increase in the traffic to 
the remaining caches causeing damage to their surrounding areas, which 
would probably make people want to take them away even faster, makeing 
the situation even worse for the remaining caches.  After a bit there 
would be so few caches and so many people going to them that where ever 
they were hidden would be destroyed almost over night.... killing 
geocaching.

People just need to use their heads when hiding their caches and ask 
themselves... what are people going to do when looking for my cache. 
With that in mind, maybe people won't poke a cache in the middle of a 
bush that would have to be repetedly disturbed or walked on and 
eventually smooshed.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek
AzGeocaching.com