Back to Geocaching

I’ve been Geocaching since 2003. Like most new hobbies, I did A LOT of it at first. Eventually I found other things to do with my time, but I never completely quit Geocaching – I just slowed it down quite a bit.

This month I got my regular Geocaching newsletter, which I always read. In it they announced a 31 Days of Geocaching challenge. They were encouraging people to get out and find at least 1 geocache a day for the entire month of August. I’ve been sitting here at my desk, staring at the screen all sedentary and shit, and not really getting out and moving much for months. Part of it is because of the unbearable heat we get out here in Menifee during the Summer, but to be honest I have to admit that most of the reason is just sheer laziness. Seeing how I hadn’t been doing much Geocaching lately, I decided that I’d give this challenge a go and try to get back into it.

So far I’ve missed 1 day (August 4th) of the challenge but have chosen to keep going and I’m doing pretty well so far … well, considering it’s only the 6th now. Today was a bit of a challenge, however. According to Geocaching.com there are quite a few geocaches in my area. What it doesn’t, or rather can’t, tell me is whether or not those geocaches are still there. I went out to grab one near my house only to find out that it’s no longer there and hasn’t been in months. When I went to look up other local geocaches I found that many of them hadn’t had a “found it” posted in many months, and some of them hadn’t had a find posted for over 2 years! There are also a bunch of other geocaches where people have posted notes that the geocache was in need of maintenance or appeared to be missing but the cache owner never followed up with them. It seems that there’s a problem with geocaches in the area of Menifee!

What I’ve decided to do is to start searching for the long-ignored geocaches and either verify that they are still there or that they’re long gone. The ones that are gone I’ll recommend for archiving so they don’t show up on searches. The rest I’ll be able to post as a find, hopefully encouraging other local Geocachers to go out and find them, too. I might even place some new ones of my own again!

This entry was written from 33°43.148′N, 117°09.795′W.