quality of hides

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:33 pm

Do you feel the quality of hides are better or worse than when you first started? If worse how would you help hiders to bring the quality back up?

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 5:50 pm

All in all the quality in my opinion is about the same. It all depends on where you are and what you like to find. In the northwoods we still find many ammo boxes, but when closer to the populated areas there are more micros. But there are still quality hides all over the state, If you want to find a hidden jem, search out a regular cache in a urban area, usually there will be a nice park or green space.

Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 6:36 pm

I also would have to agree that the quality of the geocaches are the same. As Sweetlife said "it all depends on where you are". I feel that really has a lot to do with it. Wherever we go through out the state I've never really been disappointed by a geocache.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 1:47 pm

I agree also

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 3:05 pm

Yeah, the quality has stayed about the same, but the amount has increased. We happen to have some very responsible hiders in this state along with a successful LCG that helps out quite a bit.

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:21 pm

Quality of Hides:

There are so many more hides now than when we first started. Back then, everyone was new and exciting for us. GPS receivers weren;t quite as good as they are now which made things a little dicey on coords. These days many caches are placed with cell phones and at times those too can have some shakey coords but concering cache placement, the satellite maps have helped a lot.

There's many more players in the game and the creativity that's out there can be pretty impressive.

I think there's a natural ebb and flow to the game as people learn more about creating hides and gain experience, trying to improve the caches they place.

I like to try and give feedback on caches that have been placed by newer cachers, letting them know what I've found that works well and not so well but leaving it up to them on how they want to hide their caches since they are a reflection of the CO and the caches are theirs to do with as they wish.

Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2013 10:01 pm

Since I started geocaching, it has evolved and changed.

I do still see the fun and creative hides as well as the "really another guard rail?".

For me, I seek out the caches hidden by hiders I enjoy finding. If a particular hider is known for lame hides, I will ignore those.

In the Geo 101 classes, I try very hard to explain how different people hide caches differently so to not get discouraged. I also have been encouraging new cachers to find a variety of caches before they hide their own.

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 8:54 pm

I haven't been at this for too long so I don't really think that the quality of hides has really changed very much. I would say that my own caching habits have changed a bit. The first year that I was geocaching I didn't really even try for the difficult caches. Once I got over my fear they got a little addicting. I also often went for PNG's because I was determined to get a respectable amount of finds under my belt. Now I pretty much skip those PNG's unless I'm just have a few minutes to kill, usually before I pick my kiddos up from school.

I can't remember who it was who told me this, I think it might have been Sandlanders, but they advised me to hide the type of caches that I like to find. I've tried to do this myself ever since and quite enjoy making interesting containers or placing the caches out in the woods on a nice trail. I think I would encourage others to do the same, but also recognize that everyone likes to geocache differently so there isn't one formula on what makes a great cache.