A quick reminder about cache adoptions

[Team Deejay]

There have been quite a few threads recently with people trying to get new owners for caches they no longer can (or want to) maintain. This is all well and good, but I do need to provide a bit of a warning to both sides of this transaction.

For the original placers, please remember that this process is PERMANENT. Once you give up your cache to someone else, they can move it, replace your ammo box with a nano, change your 20 stage multi to a 2 stage with waypoints at either end of a guardrail, change your history field puzzle into a Sudoku, etc. Worse, they can also archive your listing, or even worse, fail to maintain it so it gets archived for lack of maintenance. All I am saying is that if you do care about what happens to your listing, please select your adopters carefully.

For adopters, remember that you are committing to maintain any listing that you adopt. If you choose to adopt a cache 300 miles away from your home, and then choose not to maintain it, the community will consider you to be a knucklehead. If you choose to adopt an historic listing (especially a virtual) and then radically change it or archive it, people will call you names which cannot be listed in this forum. It’s simple, really. Just don’t take on responsibilities that you can’t (or won’t) handle.

Again, this isn’t intended to discourage anyone from adopting caches. Just a warning to make sure everyone understands how this works.

[RSplash40]

Hahahaha! Humorous but very appropriate… thanks for the post Dave!

.. now to go PM some knuckleheads 😛

[kc9gbo]

Sure, why didn’t you post this like Friday night before I accepted the adoption request?
Seriously good advice and something that almost should be referenced in the wiki or pinned.
As for the cache that I adopted was disabled due to it being missing and I have all intentions to replace it but now due to the heavy snowfall it may end up waiting until spring when I can make the climb to it.
Thanks for the great advice!

[Team Black-Cat]

I hope I can give some advice without ruffling anyone’s feathers.

There is no shame in archiving a cache. It is not a sign of failure to archive a cache. Very few caches need to last forever.

[-cheeto-]

@Team Black-Cat wrote:

I hope I can give some advice without ruffling anyone’s feathers.

There is no shame in archiving a cache. It is not a sign of failure to archive a cache. Very few caches need to last forever.

I will also add that it’s a very responsible thing to do as a cache owner if maintaining is no longer an option.

Don’t forget to remove the “geo-litter” or post a cache rescue mission as others are waiting and willing to do so (in most cases).

In a highly populated area archiving a cache often means another can/will be placed there by another cacher who wants to place a cache — which then everyone can find.

Some caches and series should be adopted and maintained if someone is willing. Some caches, probably not. That’s how I evaluated my own collection of placements.

[seldom|seen]

@Team Deejay wrote:

All I am saying is that if you do care about what happens to your listing, please select your adopters carefully.

That’s the challenge. You may think you’ve selected the right person(s) for the job given their initial enthusiasm and it isn’t until you notice one get archived for lack of communication that you realize you’ve made a mistake.

I am in the process of pulling back a number of mine previously adopted, many in the capable hands of cachers I trust, just for a little piece of mind.

Yes, no cache needs to be permanent, and yes, turnover is good and inevitable. I cannot disagree with that. I do have a bias towards keeping mine alive, if only because of the investments made to get them published. That and the knowledge, or maybe belief, that they do a decent job of highlighting historical or cultural moments and monuments that a replacement cache might not highlight as well and two, would bring you back to revisit the same spot to look at the same stuff to log another find, which doesn’t seem very rewarding to me.

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