For the past several years my geocaching quota has dropped off the map. My wife really loved virtuals... (yeah). My old went off to college, and my younger two never really enjoyed it.  My youngest got into competitive archery and we have been doing tournaments on a national level. And there went the time and money.  I still love it, but, I don't have the people to do it with (in my family) that I once did.

In some ways I miss the Halloween Radioactives (I still have the shirts, pictures, and memories). Those were events like none other.  While Tamo and crew put huge resources into these, I tried to be of some value in putting these together. Even that little effort was a lot of work.  But, I miss the association of all these good folks.

I have dozens of caches in the four miles radius of my home. At one point I nearly had all of them in a 10 mile radius.  Time change, people change.  But, man, it was (and still is) fun.

Steven Stringham
StringCachers


On 12/4/2011 11:23 PM,  wogun1 wrote:

A shout out to Team Tierra Buena!  Nice to see you name again! We are still out there too—and loving it! Hope to run into you one day!

 

Terry & Barb

wogunhiker

 

From: az-geocaching-bounces@listserv.azgeocaching.com [mailto:az-geocaching-bounces@listserv.azgeocaching.com] On Behalf Of Team Tierra Buena
Sent: Sunday, December 04, 2011 7:46 PM
To: listserv@azgeocaching.com
Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] Are people still caching?

 

We're still caching, and we're still enjoying it as much as ever, even after ten years.. But we've become much more selective about the kinds of caches we go after. I don't think it's dying, I think it's just become fragmented in a number of ways: geographically, for one, how the caching communities communicate internally and externally is another, and perhaps most significantly, there is fragmentation in terms of what cachers see as their goals. For many, it's become a numbers game, and I think it's a tribute to geocaching that it's been able to adapt to accommodate that. And all the other ways to play that have evolved over the years. For us, though, it's still and always has been about location. We want to cache someplace that's beautiful or interesting or unusual, and we don't want finding the cache to be a vision test when we get there, because our aging eyes will most likely flunk that test and spoil the fun.

Brian, I can also agree with you from experience that trying (or being forced) to take geocaching from the world of recreation to the world of business and lawyers will definitely, as you put it, suck the joy out of it. Someone in one of these recent posts mentioned Halloween Radioactive... I almost became physically ill seeing those two words in print again. Those were the years when caching took over our lives, while at the same time we did next to no caching. 

Just Hike once referred to us as "old school cachers", and we took that title with pride. We can't wait until next weekend so we can go out caching again -- our way.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Brian Cluff brian-at-snaptek.com |Geocaching-AZ/Sneak1.0 Allow| <4ljlb6dntt@sneakemail.com> wrote:

I personally haven't been out in quite a while.  The cachers that I run into all tell me that they aren't looking for caches anymore, though some say they still go to some of the get together events to hang out with friends.

I know for me the joy was sucked out of it when the lawyers for geocaching.com contacted us to tell us to take down functionality that we had created and they had copied..

This discussion list has also died.  It used to get a couple dozen messages a day in its heyday, now we get about a message a month.

Are people still caching?  It seems like it became a dying/dead fad from where I sit.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek
AzGeocaching.com