Listing Services
Geocaching.com is not the only place caches are listed, and it never was. The Opencaching networks, Navicache, Terracaching, what each one is today, and an honest account of the ones that closed.
7 reference pages Open →
A geocaching reference: listing services, gear and safety
Additional hint
Every cache page ends with a hint you only decode if you need it. This one is the whole argument: the hobby was never a scoreboard. What follows is a reference to the services that list caches, the gear that finds them, the safety lessons learned the hard way, the craft of a container worth the walk, and the argument the community has been having with its own find count since the very first hide.
A geocaching reference, not a listing service
Geocaching has been running since May 2000, and in that time it has accumulated a great deal of practical knowledge that lives in forum threads, club newsletters and the memory of people who have been caching for twenty years. Very little of it is written down in one place. This site is an attempt to write some of it down: what the alternative listing services are and which of them still work, why a phone reports you as standing on a cache that is nowhere in sight, how to label a container so a passer-by calls you rather than the police, and what separates a hide people enjoy from a hide people complain about.
None of it requires an account. There is nothing to buy here, nothing to sign up for and no leaderboard. Every claim carries the source it rests on and the date that source is dated to, and where a claim comes from a single source that could not be independently checked, the page says so rather than presenting it as settled fact.
Trackables
How travel bugs stall and vanish, what actually helps them move, and the strangest objects ever released into the wild with a tracking code attached.
3 reference pages Open →
The Numbers
Find counts, streaks, power trails, challenge caches and spoiler etiquette, plus where the hobby came from, and why its own name is an argument.
6 reference pages Open →
Most cited page
- Published
- 5 June 2012
- Subject
- Navicache
- Founded
- 2001
- Difficulty
- ● ● ● ○ ○
- Terrain
- ● ● ○ ○ ○
- Cited by
- Wikipedia (EN, MS)
The rebirth of Navicache
One of geocaching’s original listing services was sold in 2012 to owners with a detailed plan: a rebuilt interface, a newsletter, a mobile app, free hosting for clubs. Ten years later the front page still carried a copyright line ending in 2011. The site then went dark, and the domain resurfaced serving something else entirely.
It is the most-cited page on this site, and the clearest illustration of what actually keeps an alternative listing service alive, which turns out not to be ownership, funding or a plan.
The hobby is not the same everywhere
NZA caching culture built around long walks rather than roadside numbers.
PTOne of the most active national communities anywhere, and it does not run on the .com.
DEOpencaching.de runs in parallel with its own rules and its own following.
PLA separate Opencaching network, still maintained by volunteers after two decades.
AUDistance changes everything about how a cache is placed, found and maintained.
How the pages are put together
Each reference page opens with what the thing actually is, moves through how it works in practice, and closes with what changed and what is still true. Where a page makes a factual claim about a service, a device or an incident, that claim is tied to something checkable: a registry record, an archived capture of the page as it stood, a live request made on the date shown, or a published source named in the text.
Where the record is thin, the page says the record is thin. A number repeated for a decade by people with an interest in it being large is reported as a claim, not as a measurement. This matters more than it sounds: a great deal of what "everyone knows" about the hobby traces back to a single unverified sentence written a long time ago.
The sections are ordered by how much of the community’s accumulated argument sits in them rather than by how many pages they contain. Listing services comes first because the question of where a cache lives is older than any of the software that answers it.
Every page carries the date it was last verified, and that date means a person opened the sources again rather than that a script touched the file. Where something has been re-checked and turned out to have changed, the page says what it used to say. A reference that quietly edits itself is asking to be trusted on exactly the point where it has stopped being checkable.
Questions people actually ask
Is this the official geocaching website?
No. Geocaching.com is operated by Groundspeak, and the Opencaching networks are run by their own volunteer teams. This site is an independent reference that writes about all of them.
Nothing here is a listing service. You cannot log a find, register a cache or look up coordinates on this site: it explains how those services work and how they differ.
What does the site name mean?
It is the community’s own saying. When someone posts a milestone and another cacher replies "remember, it is not about the numbers", they mean the point of the hobby is the place, the container and the walk: not the total on your profile.
The phrase has been argued about for as long as the hobby has existed, which is exactly why it makes a good name for a reference that takes the argument seriously.
Why is the headline written in code?
Every cache listing ends with a hint that is stored in ROT13 (each letter shifted thirteen places) so you only read it if you decide you need it. Pressing Decrypt does to the site name what cachers do to a hint in the field.
Do I need a GPS unit to start?
No. A modern phone is accurate enough for the overwhelming majority of caches, and every mainstream listing service has an app. A dedicated handheld earns its place under tree cover, in canyons, on long days away from a charger and in weather that would end a phone.
The gear section compares them honestly rather than pushing you toward either.
How often is this reference checked?
Each page carries the date it was last verified, at the foot of the page. Live services are re-checked in that pass: whether a listing site still answers, whether a network is still maintained, and whether a claim made years ago turned out to be true.
Checked 24 August 2026