Counts, streaks and power trails

What the number is

A find count is the number of caches you have logged. It is not a fake measurement, it correlates with time spent outdoors, distance walked and places visited, and someone with a very large total has unquestionably done a great deal of walking.

What it cannot do is distinguish. A cache found in ninety seconds beside a petrol station and a cache that took a day on a ridge in bad weather both add one. Every argument in this section descends from that single flattening.

Streaks

A streak is consecutive days with at least one find. People maintain them for years.

The uncharitable reading is compulsion. The accurate reading, from people who keep them, is that a streak is a commitment device: it supplies a reason to leave the house on a wet Tuesday in November when there is no other reason, and the walks that result are ones that would not otherwise have happened.

The cost is that it changes what you look for on those days. A streak needs a find, not a good find, and on the thin days you take what is available. Streak-keepers are usually the first to say so.

Power trails

A power trail is a long series of caches placed close together along a route so that many can be found in a short time. Some run for tens of kilometres.

The complaint is that they are not really caching, that a container every few hundred metres along a road, identical to the last one, is a mechanism for generating numbers rather than an invitation to a place.

The defence is more interesting than the complaint. Power trails concentrate volume caching in specific locations, which means the people who enjoy it have somewhere to do it that is not the carefully placed hide in the nature reserve. They create events, group trips and a reason to visit places tourism ignores. And they are honest about what they are, nobody drives a power trail expecting a curated experience.

What the argument is really about

Strip out the moralising and a substantive question remains: what does the community reward, and what does that produce?

If the visible achievement is a total, the rational response for a cache owner who wants finds is to place caches that are quick and easy to reach. Do that at scale and the average cache becomes faster, shallower and closer to a road.

If the visible achievement were something else (favourites, distance, difficulty) a different set of caches would get built. The metric is not neutral. It is a design decision about the hobby, made by whoever runs the listing service, and it has consequences for what exists in the ground.

That is why an argument that sounds like snobbery is worth taking seriously. It is not about whether your total is legitimate. It is about which caches get placed next year.

Where this site stands

Named as it is, this reference is obviously not neutral, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The position is narrower than the name suggests. A find count is fine. Streaks are fine. Power trails are fine and the people who love them are not doing the hobby wrong.

What is worth resisting is the count becoming the objective, because the moment it does, the places stop being the reason and start being the obstacle between one log and the next.

What the number does not distinguish

The complaint that the total is a poor measure is usually made vaguely. It is worth making precisely, because the precision is the whole argument.

A find count adds one for a cache that took four minutes from a parked car and one for a cache that took a day, a boat and a rope. It adds one for a container in a hedge and one for a hide somebody spent a month building. It adds one whether you signed the log thoughtfully or wrote three letters and left.

Every measurement discards information; that is what makes it a measurement. The question is whether what this one discards is the part that mattered, and for most cachers describing their own best days the answer is plainly yes.

None of which makes the number worthless. It is an accurate record of how many times you have done the thing, and there is nothing wrong with knowing that. The difficulty begins when it is the only number visible, because then it is the only one that can be compared, and comparison is what turns a personal record into a scoreboard.

The statistics people actually find interesting

Cachers who lose interest in the total almost never lose interest in their own data. They move to measures that carry the information the count throws away.

The difficulty and terrain grid: a matrix of every combination, with the ones you have completed filled in. It rewards variety rather than volume and is genuinely hard to fill.

The calendar: one square for each day of the year, filled by the date of a find. Completing it takes years and cannot be rushed by driving anywhere.

Distance, elevation and county coverage: measures of where you went rather than how often you stopped.

The interesting thing about these is that they are the community’s own answer to its own argument. Nobody legislated them. People who found the total unsatisfying built alternatives, and the popular ones all measure breadth rather than quantity.