About
This is a reference about geocaching: the services that list caches, the gear that finds them, the safety lessons, the craft, and the long argument about find counts.
What this site is
A great deal of practical knowledge about geocaching exists and very little of it is written down in one place. It lives in forum threads that are fifteen years old, in club newsletters, and in the memory of people who have been caching since the first decade. When somebody asks which alternative listing services still work, or why a container keeps filling with water, or what to write on a cache so it does not cause an incident, the answer usually exists: somewhere, in a thread, half-remembered.
This reference is an attempt to write some of it down properly. Each page takes one subject, explains what it actually is, what goes wrong with it, and what changed. It is organised into six sections: listing services, gear, safety, craft, trackables, and the argument about numbers that gives the site its name.
What it is not
It is not a listing service. You cannot log a find here, register a cache or look up coordinates. It explains how those services work and how they differ from one another.
It is not a shop. Nothing on the site earns anything from what you decide, which is why the gear pages contain no purchase links and no scores, and why the Opencaching nodes are described by what they do rather than ranked.
It is not a community. There are no accounts, no comments and no forums, because those need moderation to stay useful and this site cannot promise that.
How claims are handled
The working rule is that a claim should be tied to something checkable: a registry record, an archived capture of a page as it stood on a date, a request made to a live service on the date shown, or a published source named in the text.
Where a number has been repeated for years by people with an interest in it being large, it is reported as a claim from an interested party rather than as a measurement. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A surprising amount of what "everyone knows" about the hobby traces back to a single unverified sentence written a long time ago and quoted ever since.
Where the record is thin, the page says the record is thin. Where a date is approximate, it says approximate. A page that admits what it does not know is more useful than one that fills the gap with a confident guess.
On names
Pages describe incidents, searches that went wrong, containers mistaken for devices, caches that drew official attention, because those situations recur and there are useful lessons in them. They are written at the level of the phenomenon rather than the individual.
Named people appear only where the naming is genuinely public record: someone who gave an on-the-record interview about their own business, or published a book under their own name. People who were involved in an accident or an incident are not identified here.
Corrections
Getting something wrong is the ordinary condition of writing about a subject with a patchy record. What matters is fixing it, and the correction is more valuable when it comes with the evidence attached: a date, a capture, a registry entry.
Every page carries its own verification date, so it is always possible to see how old the checking behind a claim actually is.
There is nowhere to send it here, and the contact page explains why rather than publishing an address nobody reads. The place a correction lands is the source: the listing service’s own help channel, the Opencaching node that maintains the record, or the forum thread the claim came from. Corrected there, it reaches the people who maintain the thing being described — and it is what this reference reads the next time the page is verified.
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 and speaks for none of them.
There is no official body for geocaching as a hobby. That is not an oversight. The absence of a governing authority is why several listing services can exist at once.
Who maintains this reference?
A small editorial team, working anonymously. Pages carry no byline because the claims on them are meant to stand on the evidence cited rather than on who wrote them.
Where a page relies on a source that cannot be independently verified, it says so in the text rather than presenting the claim as settled.
How are the pages checked?
Every page shows the date it was last verified, at the foot of the page. Verification means re-running the checks the page depends on: whether a service still answers, whether an archived capture still supports a claim about a date, and whether a registry record still says what the page says it says.
Live services are checked with a real request rather than from memory.
Can I use this material?
Quote it, link to it and correct it. If you find something wrong, the useful thing is to say what the evidence is (a date, a capture, a record) rather than only that it disagrees with your recollection.
There is nowhere to send that correction here — this reference runs no mailbox, and the contact page explains why. The place a correction actually lands is the source: the listing service’s own help channel, the Opencaching node that maintains the record, or the forum thread the claim came from. That is also where this reference looks when a page is next verified.
Checked 24 August 2026