This checkin to GC7QC7R Lothal reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
As a quick diversion from the nearby WAG series, the geopup and I meandered out this way to find this cache. Once I was in the vicinity of the cache something stood out to me as unusual, so we went to pick it up… it turned out to be a chunk of wraught iron, but finding it soon pointed me in the direction of the cache. TFTC.
This checkin to GC610PB WAG 12 - Wroxhills Wood reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
A quick and easy find: we walked straight to where the coordinates said and there it was. My phone, having been rebooted during the last leg, was now behaving much better at narrowing down a satellite fix!
These woods are really quite amazingly beautiful and serene. It’s quiet and calm here, and both the geopup and I really appreciate the excuse to have come here.
Next, it’s time for a quick diversion from the series to find nearby GC7QC7R!
This checkin to GC54DXQ WAG 13 - Oh deer! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Took several attempts to find the correct hiding place and the poor geopup – who didn’t like the tight-knit undergrowth here except when it suited her (when she wanted to chase after a pheasant!) – eventually had to be tied to a tree while I pressed-on without her to get the cache in hand. Phew! TFTC.
This checkin to GC78WN6 WAG 8 - Battle Farm reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
This was the moment when I found myself wishing that my dedicated GPSr unit was with me and working, as my phone’s GPS fix started jumping all over the place. The geopup and I made a few valiant attempts to search in the obvious places, criss-crossing our way through some quite fierce brambles as we did so, but without success. Eventually, we had to move on and chalk this one up as a DNF. I’ve no reason to believe it’s not out there somewhere, but it’ll be a job for somebody whose satellite navigation kit is playing ball.
This checkin to GC54DF1 WAG 7 - Fuming! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The geopup made herself useful for this cache, running straight to the cache location. (I suspect that some prior canine visitor may have left their mark somewhere very near to the cache, and she was more interested in smelling that than she was at helping me find the container, but I can dream of a dog who’s a useful geocaching assistant, can’t I?) TFTC.
This checkin to GC54DEF WAG 6 - Water Break reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Working our way through the first part of the WAG series, we unfortunately had to skip this one without an adequate search: the area was crawling with ramblers, consulting their maps and chatting with one another, and I didn’t have a good excuse to stop and search. Maybe next time!
This checkin to GC9BYME WAG 5a reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The geopup struggles to understand why I sometimes insist on stopping our walks to go and poke around in the nearby trees, and this time was no exception. The hint could refer to one of several hiding places, and like a previous cacher I worried for a moment that the hiding place might have been destroyed by some recent logging work in this area, but nope: it’s still here! It was a little more-challenging to retreieve than it perhaps was originally, though, as a pile of branches has been placed between the path and the hiding place, but we found it in the end then pushed on across the road, waving to some friendly cyclists as we did so.
This checkin to GC8C4TE WAG 5 - Battle reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Another excellent bit of camoflage here, on what has so-far appeared to be a well-loved but well-maintained series. The geopup and I went back and forth a few times before we found the correct host, but soon had the cache in hand. TFTC.
This checkin to GC54DD8 WAG 4 - Chiltern Way Extension reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Unfortunately, my dedicated GPSr had been left turned-on after my last geocaching/geohashing/whatever expedition, and I hadn’t realised until I was just setting off this morning. I tried to charge it in the car but it didn’t take on enough battery to make it worthwhile to bring it out, so I was working from my phone (whose GPSr is… adequate… usually), and my watch (whose GPSr is good, but whose user interface for caching is pretty pants).
But luckily for this cache at least my geosense brought me to exactly the right spot, and I quickly saw something that looked out of place. Imagine my delight when I pulled on it and the cache was in my hand. Fantastic stuff, TFTC.
This checkin to GC54DB8 WAG 3 - Cleeve Corner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The time before last that I was in Goring – the first of my now-three visits – was for a birthday/garden party on 24 June 2018. My eldest – then only four years old – was getting a little bored of the grown-up conversations going on and I provided a distraction by taking her out to find GLW5FKG9 and GLW5EFV2 (the latter of which has since been archived).
I enjoyed the camoflage on this cache, but little did I know that it would be a theme throughout many of the caches in this series! FP awarded anyway, because it delighted me at the time. TFTC.
This checkin to GC54DAM WAG 2 - Cow Hill reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The last time I was in Goring was on 9 June 2022, when I cycled here via Eynsham, Abingdon, and Didcot. I enjoyed a meal at at Whale Inn in Streatley, then meandered down into Goring in order to catch a tran part of the way home (I was feeling lazy). Another easy find here. TFTC.
This checkin to GC54D9K WAG 1 - See the light reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Ignoring times that I’ve passed-through, I’ve only ever visited Goring twice before. It’s time to rectify that! This morning, the dog and I drove down from Stanton Harcourt (near Witney), parked up, and begun our attempts at the first half of the WAG trail (along with a couple of others along the way).
Starting as we mean to continue, this was a very quick first find. TFTC.
When geocachers find a geocache, they typically “log” their find both in the cache’s paper logbook and on one of the online listing sites on which the cache’s coordinates can be found.1
I’ve been finding and hiding geocaches for… a long while, so I’ve seen lots of log entries from people who’ve found my caches (and those of others). And it feels to me like the average length of a geocaching log entry is getting shorter.
“It feels to me like…” isn’t very scientific, though. Let’s see if we can do better.
To test my hypothesis, I needed a decade or so of logs. I didn’t want to compare old caches to new caches (in case people are biased by the logs before them) so I used Geocaching.com’s own search to open the pages for the 500 caches closest to me that are each at least 10 years old.
I hacked together a quick userscript to save all of the logs in a way that was easier than copy-pasting each of them but still didn’t involve hitting Geocaching.com’s API or automating bulk-scraping (which would violate their terms of service). Clicking each of several hundred tabs once every few minutes in the background while I got on with other things wasn’t as much of an ordeal as you might think… but it did take a while.
I mashed that together into a CSV file and for the first time looked at the size of my sample data: ~134,000 log entries, spanning 20 years. I filtered out everything over 10 years old (because some of the caches might have no logs that old) and stripped out everything that wasn’t a “found it” or “didn’t find it” log.
That gave me a far more-reasonable ~80,000 records with which I could make Excel cry.2
It looks like my hunch is right. The wordcount of “found” logs on traditional and multi-stage caches has generally decreased over time:
“Did not find” logs, which can be really helpful for cache owners to diagnose problems with their caches, have an even more-pronounced dip:
When I first saw that deep dip on the average length of “did not find” logs, my first thought was to wonder whether the sample might not be representative because the did-not-find rate itself might have fallen over time. But no: the opposite is true:
Strangely, the only place that the trend is reversed is in “found” logs of virtual caches, which have seen a slight increase in verbosity.
Within the limitations of my research (80,000 logs from 500 caches each 10+ years old, near me), there are a handful of clear trends over the last decade:
Are these trends a sign of shortening attention spans? Increased use of mobile phones for logging? Use of emoji and acronyms to pack more detail into shorter messages? I don’t know.
I’d love to see some wider research, perhaps by somebody at Geocaching.com HQ (who has database access and is thus able to easily extract enough data for a wider analysis!). I’m also very interested in whether the identity of the cache finder has an impact on log length: is it impacted by how long ago they started ‘caching? Whether or not they have hidden caches of their own? How many caches they’ve found?
But personally, I’m just pleased to have been able to have a question in the back of my mind and – through a little bit of code and a little bit of data-mashing – have a pretty good go at answering it.
1 I have a dream that someday cache logging could be powered by Webmentions or ActivityPub or some similar decentralised-Web technology, so that cachers can log their finds on any site on which a cache is listed or even on their own site and have all the dots joined-up… but that’s pretty far-fetched I’m afraid. It’s not stopping some of us from experimenting with possible future standards, though…
2 Just for fun, try asking Excel to extrapolate a second-order polynomial trendline across 80,000 pairs of datapoints. Just don’t do it if you’re hoping to use your computer for anything in the next quarter hour.
3 With stricter guidelines on how a “virtual rewards” virtual caches should work than existed for original pre-2005 virtuals, these new virtuals are more-likely than their predecessor to encourage or require longer logs.
This checkin to GC3D6J8 The Leap Year Club reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Enjoyed solving this puzzle, although possibly not 100% in the way the author intended (I spotted some mathematical quirks that gave me a shortcut/cut down the number of possibilities for matching first and surnames!). Now I just need to find an excuse to get over to the GZ and find it! (No idea how soon that’ll be, though!)
Solving this puzzle cache was inspired by a conversation on the Geoleaks forum.
This checkin to GC7Z2J6 Pinsley Wood by Olivia and Jessica reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
No luck here this morning for the geopup and I. The undergrowth has come through incredibly thick your summer, and we had to work hard to hunt in likely locations. (The hint didn’t help much, as it wasn’t entirely clear which direction it assumed we were coming from, but the GPSr good looked good so I figure we were on the right spot.) Strangely, we did find a bauble (pictured) – did somebody decorate these woods for Christmas, I wonder?
