As 2010 comes to a close and all good geocachers are hoping to find a Garmin in their Christmas stocking, Opencaching.Com rolls out their geocaching search engine. Enter the torches and pitchforks. Opencaching.Com, Opencaching.Us, and the king of the hill Geocaching.Com, What’s a cacher to do? Go find some geocaches.
Those of you who know me might have some assumption as to where this post might go, you would be wrong this time. Lets start with Geocaching.Com. I enjoy hunting caches using my Android application. I always have my phone which means I always have access to nearby caches. No fuss, no pocket queries, don’t need a computer, can get the cache page just like the listing, read past logs, etc… It makes casual caching a pleasure. Since I am a casual cacher, I log very few caches. The last cache I can remember logging was a P&G in the Lyman area, and that was because I was showing a fellow cacher how the Android Geocaching app works. I even thought about signing up for the premium membership to hunt a few of the better PM caches and maybe start logging. I wonder how many cachers just fell out of their chair?
That being said, Garmins Opencaching.Com looks like a neat site. It clearly states on the homepage that it is a beta site which I assume means the initial launch and it will take some refining. It has quite a few bugs to work out, but a company like Garmin probably isn’t short on resources. Garmin/Opencaching.Com brings some concepts to the table that most of us aren’t used to such as the lack of a reviewer in the listing process. FYI letterboxing has a similar process and that hasn’t harmed the hide seek sport that we all love to play. That’s not the point of this post though. Regardless of what Garmin does with their site, the object of what we like to do is find hidden things. Most times this amounts to nothing more than a container with a piece of paper in it. If the container is large enough, we might find a toy. There has been a considerable amount of activity on Opencaching.com’s forum apparently by groundspeak fans explaining how damaging their presence will be to geocaching. Examples are cited, some factual, some theory, but an attempt none-the-less to discredit a new sites concept on hiding… a toy. A groundspeak reviewer once made reference to this type of behavior. If the backbiting and slander continues, nobody will remember who was wrong and who was right. It’s just noise and makes both look bad. Choose the site you support and help them grow. That would be healthy for the sport, and promote geocaching.
I will promote both sites and hope the competition yeilds cool new games and gadgets for geocaching. I must admit Garmins site has piqued my interest but, I enjoy the groundspeak Android app and the fact anytime I feel like finding a cache I can fire it up and I will be within a few miles of an adventure. Bet you couldn’t see this post coming!
The noise hurts us all, just my opinion. Cache and let cache.
Ron
