With over 350 active hides I can tell from the logs we receive that “it’s all about the numbers”. The pngs get found much more often. Our GC2VTK8 is 2 years old and has only been found 13 times in 2 years. It requires you to find a cache on the IAT in half of the counties that the trail passes through.
After 6000+ finds we are getting a little bored. Not with caching, but with the hides. Even though the bike trail caches are a little monotonous we really like them. The last three weekends were spent on bike trails. We are working on a couple of your challenges Gwyn. The classics one and the oddities. We hope to qualify for both by the end of the year. The funny thing is that I have no idea where the finals are hidden and haven’t even thought about going to get them. We’ll be camping at Governor Dodge at the end of this month and have looked at a couple of KFH challenges that we have a dent in. Our hiding philosophy has changed too. Since our pngs get found more than our nice hikes – no more pngs unless there is a specific purpose. We’ll be hiding more puzzles and more hikes. I have a bird themed one in my head that will be a must for you. Hope to hide it this fall on the IAT.

The DeLorme Challenge has never really interested us. It is based on a commercial atlas that can change at any time, and it has. While there is now a way we can track our progress on the newer WI challenge, we’ll have to drag out our tattered version that is needed for the original DeLorme and check it out page by page, if we want to do that.

We like going for the counties better because counties are more definitive units than pages in a map book. Each county has its own distinct character, and when we “claim” a county, we have a good idea of what there is to see and do there.

Yes, the cost of gas is a factor, but caching and traveling around the state is how we spend our leisure dollars, and we plan for it. We hit caches in other states when we travel, but we won’t go for any challenges in any of them that require multiple trips. Wisconsin’s where it’s at for us! 😀

I say keep it going, Splash. Just tell people that they will have to keep track on their own and submit a bookmark. Or at least see how many people are still working on this before changing or archiving it. It may not be that important to us as a team, but it is to a lot of people.

Now, if it’s too much of a headache for you as the CO to verify everyone’s finds, then it becomes like any other cache. If it has become work and is no longer enjoyable for you to have out there, do what you want with it.

@hack1of2 wrote:

We’re slowly working on the Delorme challenge, and show our progress on our GC profile page (we have all of the challenges we’re working on shown on that page). We love challenges! Having said that, we are more focused on the Badger State Challenge GC15WT3 (find a cache in all 72 WI counties) rather than the Delorme, which has arbitrary borders, but we’re working on both. We only have 6 of the 72 counties remaining, and plan to grab the three we need from NW WI this summer. I imagine that after we complete the Badger State Challenge, the Delorme challenge will take on a greater significance.

My guess is that one of the factors in the “diminished” interest in the Delorme Challenge is that there are so many other challenges out there. Plus as others have mentioned, park & grabs etc. also compete for one’s time and resources these days. Sounds like a good topic for the WGA newsletter and geocaching continuing education seminars…
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I’m pretty sure that you just volunteered to write an article for the next newsletter about challenges. Thanks Hack1of2, I appreciate it and look forward to reading it! 😆

I absolutely loved both DeLorme Challenges. I like the challenges that take more time to complete. There is nothing more fun than planning and plotting a trip. I have discovered that I am a gazatteer junkie. I love maps! I love looking at them and determining which cache will satisfy a page. I use a sharpie on the back cover and sharpie in the completed pages so I can see at a glance what I needed to still complete. I am working on DeLorme challenges in neighboring states and having a blast. It will take years, but that’s the fun in challenges like this. You can’t just do them. You have to be intentional which is probably why they don’t see as much action. I am actually working on a challenge currently (2 1/2 years now) hidden by a certain geocaching pair who started this topic….Cheesy? Heck yes! I’ll get it eventually and have a blast along the way!

Personally, I just don’t cache enough. If I set out to tackle a sizable challenge, it would probably be a decade before I’d get close to finishing. Besides not knowing if I could keep up the enthusiasm long enough…the cache itself would probably be archived by the time I qualified for it. Normally, I believe in qualifying for a challenge cache before finding it, so I probably wouldn’t find the cache first and then fill in my grid.

A lot of the challenges I’ve seen, like the ones linked to in this thread, are very appealing to me and how I’d like to cache. But, I also look at them like my Netflix queue. I’ll add a movie to my queue because I want to see it (eventually) and two years later, it hasn’t made it to the top yet. The initial excitement of a challenge, for me, is going to wear off. Am I still going to be trying to finish a DeLorme challenge years from now? I can’t say that I would be.