Two recent posts, one concerning geocaching etiquette and another relating an incident where the cache seeker felt that a cache was placed in an unsuitable location, have rekindled a general concern for the sport that I've had since I first learned about it.

Geocaching is a very new activity for me so I haven't seen public discussions of it until the last few weeks. If the subject of this post has been beaten up in the past then I apologize, but would like to have a brief summary of where folks stand. If not, then this may start or continue a needed discussion.

Geocaching is still a small, low impact sport. I believe it’s been less than two years since the GPS was given the precision to allow finding a location to within 10-20 feet. Presently there are over 250 caches in Arizona and growing steadily. It’s not inconceivable that we could grow exponentially for some time. If we double each year for only seven years there will be over thirty thousand caches in the state. This obviously seems impossible at present but my point is that given the potential of the sport, it could easily grow much larger than we now experience. Now is the time to be proactive about discussing possible future effects on public lands and placing some rules to prevent problems with Forest Service, BLM, state land and urban park managers, not to mention the moral issue of protecting our environment in general.

Topics may include policies for placing caches in designated wilderness areas (there should be none is the obvious answer for me) and removing caches or not placing them at all in fragile and/or high use conditions. There might come a time when we are so large that a limit should be imposed on the “life span” of a cache before it should be removed, or an upper limit on the number of caches placed within a given area, etc. In general, we need to keep this sport as the pleasurable while still land friendly activity it now enjoys.

I'll stop here and add further opinions when I see where this thread goes. My guess is that the majority, if not all of us, appreciate the natural areas of Arizona enough that we place our sport second to protection of the locations that are already often too negatively impacted by other forces.