This topic contains 6 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by 
hack1of2 8 years ago.
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Recently, someone saw we’d done maintenance on a couple of our caches that hadn’t been visited in a long time. That individual contacted us and suggested we archive them because “things are getting stale around here.” There are different opinions on the topic of cache permenance, and I respect those divergent points of view. However, here’s a case for keeping rarely visited caches available. We were on our trip to Yellowstone and had put in a cache that looked close to where we’d be staying one night. As it turned out, we traveled on “travel at risk” roads to get there and were richly rewarded for our trouble. We were the first caching visitors in over a year. Thank goodness the cache wasn’t archived because “no one visits” or we probably wouldn’t have discovered the spot.
Something to consider. As we ourselves have shifted to more of vacation and travel cachers, some of ours that fall victim to ‘whatever’ will probably be archived, but they won’t be dumped because “no one visits.” The ones we’d checked were there and fine. It’s just that not many want to hike to them these days. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves! 😉
My thoughts: basically I think if an owner is maintaining a cache and wants to keep it, that is the owner’s prerogative. There will be new cachers who haven’t found it, or people who just haven’t gotten around to finding it. Of course, longtime prolific local cachers may want something new. They could place more, maybe collaborate on a series with others. Or perhaps try asking cache owners if they would be willing to open up a coveted spot. However, if your specific example cache isn’t getting many finders because of distance of hike or terrain difficulty, why would a new cache there be any different? Like any cache one owns, keep it if you want and can maintain it. Archive it if it loses your interest or becomes troublesome.
I’ve decided to use ‘Favorite’ points and COTM when deciding on maintaining caches. If a cache of ours needs attention, is more than 5 years old, and has only a few Favorite points (or none) it will be Archived. Just gearing toward quality by letting the finders be our guide.
That’s an interesting way to look at things. I don’t remember where we were at with FP on the two we checked. As I said, if things happen, we’ll be archiving them when it does, with a few exceptions. I like the comment from Amita, too, that if few people hike out to them now, why would a new one be any different? In this specific case….the individual could get a new smiley. If we find places we enjoy through caching, we don’t need more caches to bring us back to enjoy it again. Some people do.
When I was working on Jasmer, I appreciated all of the older caches in my area… still had to travel as far as Phoenix to finish the challenge, but all the closer ones made the challenge easier (and cheaper). I think it is up to the cache owner to decide whether or not to archive a cache… and at this point, I am very protective of my oldest caches even if all the “locals” have found them. Cache “freshness” is going to happen anyways as new people enter the game and others leave. No need for any one cacher to dictate that an area needs to be cleared out to make room for new….
I’d rather have caches that are maintained with zero favorite points than a bunch of caches that aren’t maintained and go missing without any thought by the CO of replacing or archiving them.
The best sig is no sig.
I appreciate caches that are older and active, even if they’re not visited very often. Imagine if you visited an area in another state and all of the caches were placed in 2013 or newer because all of the older caches were archived. I don’t mind people archiving their caches to make way for new caches, especially in the Milwaukee area where I live (since all of the green spaces seem to be taken), but there is good merit for keep older caches active as well. We’ve placed about 60 caches over the last 7 years, and maintain them all; we haven’t yet ever archived a cache except for our CITO events.
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