OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 140

the Geocaching.com forums who might want to follow in his team's footsteps. “Try not to
get any injuries near the beginning. Keep drinking water. Stop for a picture now and then.
Watch out for scorpions, and cactus.”
Even so, this amazing marathon was possible only because of the venue chosen: rural
roads in the high desert of south-central Nevada. Many of these highways are “power
trails,” in which easy-to-find cache containers have been placed every 528 feet (by
Geocaching.com rules, no two caches may be closer to each other than a tenth of a mile)
along the side of a road, usually at the bases of electrical poles. Why leave a trail of
geocaches along an ugly highway, rather than in some scenic nature spot? To encourage
feats of speed like this one, of course.
Cache proliferation: fifty square miles east of Denver, with its Malthusian swarm of little
geocache icons placed along “power trails”
The artificial abundance of a million-geocache world has soured some old-school cach-
ers on the game. Originally, the rarity of geo-caches was part of their allure; you had to
venture to a remote mountaintop or deserted beach to find one. By definition, how can
it be special anymore to find something so ubiquitous? Purists call the new glut of low-
quality caches “micro-spew,” and heap scorn on their most typical delivery system, the
35-millimeterfilmcanister.“Filmcanistersaretogeocachingwhatspamistoe-mail,”they
will tell you, or “Every time you hide a film canister, a fairy dies.” Ed Hall once made it
a point to find every cache in his neighborhood but finally gave up when a cache—a film
canister, natch—showed up a quarter mile from his house in the least exotic spot imagin-
able: the drive-through of his nearest Burger King. “It was at that point,” he says, “that I
realized geocaching had probably jumped some kind of shark.”