Navicache: geocaching's other listing site, and what became of it

What Navicache was: a geocaching listing site of its own

Navicache went online in 2001 as a geocaching listing site built by cachers for cachers, at a point when almost nobody had tried running one. The domain was registered on 9 February 2001 and is still registered today, which makes it one of the older addresses in the hobby, older than most of the sites that outlived it.

The 2012 report described below places its origins in Rochester, New York, under a founder using an alias. That account is second-hand and hedged in the original, so it is repeated here as a claim rather than as a fact.

It did the obvious thing: let people list and search caches without going through Geocaching.com. The interface was a set of Perl scripts, cache pages were served from displaycache2.pl, and the search ran off a ZIP-code box on the front page. The navigation never really changed: Home, FAQs, Newest Caches, Search Database, GPS Information, MyNaviCache, Forums, Chat, Photo Gallery, Links.

How big it got is harder to pin down. A June 2012 report put its peak at more than 11,500 caches and over 38,000 registered accounts. That figure comes from the people who had just bought it, relayed by a geocaching blog, and there is no independent record to check it against.

There is no traffic record to set beside that figure either. Navicache published no numbers of its own and no third party measured the site, so every surviving statement about how busy it got traces back to somebody with an interest in the answer being large.

The sale, and what was promised

In April 2012 Navicache was bought by Leeward Coast, an American company that already ran a geocaching blog called The Mad Cacher and a brand called CacheBarn. Joseph Martin and Kurt Milligan gave an interview about it that June.

The plan they described was specific. Hire a freelance Perl developer to rebuild the interface, because (in their own assessment) the site was obviously dated and visitors would leave in seconds. Fold The Mad Cacher’s social-media presence into Navicache and co-brand the two. Add a newsletter and a mobile app. Offer geocaching clubs free hosting on the company’s server space so they could run challenges off the Navicache database. Write an alert for any cache logged with three or more consecutive DNFs, and add an “I think this is dead” flag so members could retire stale listings themselves.

They were candid about why they bought an old site rather than building a new one. Navicache already had a decade of accumulated search authority and a database of hides; starting from zero, they reckoned, would have taken years to reach the same place.

They were also realistic about the competition. Asked whether they would rival Geocaching.com or Garmin’s Opencaching, Martin said “rival” was too strong a word. There was room for three, and their advantage over larger, better-funded operations would be that a small team could listen to its users and move quickly.

In January 2013 the same pair published a self-funded book, 101 Devil Caches: Your Guide to Creating Unique or Hard-To-Find Geocaches. Proceeds were earmarked for redeveloping Navicache, with a crowdfunding round planned for later that year.

What actually happened

Nothing visible.

The site’s own front page settles it. In April 2012, weeks before the interview, it carried ten navigation links and a footer reading © Copyright 2001 – 2011 Navicache. In January 2022, nearly ten years later, it carried the same ten links and the same footer, still ending in 2011. No redesign shipped. No co-branding appeared. The copyright line was never even incremented.

Sometime after January 2022 the site went down. When the address came back in 2023 it was no longer serving anything to do with geocaching: by September 2023 it was an Indonesian online-gambling site. Today the domain redirects away to an unrelated commercial page, and it is still being renewed, currently paid through February 2027.

The two brands it was bought to sit alongside are gone as well. Neither the CacheBarn nor The Mad Cacher domain resolves at all any more.

Why an alternative listing service is worth writing down

The obvious reading is that somebody over-promised. That is probably unfair. Two people bought a decade-old Perl application as a side project, funded its redevelopment out of book sales, and discovered what everyone who has tried it discovers: rewriting a live geocaching listing site is not a weekend of work, and there is no revenue in an alternative nobody is obliged to use.

The more useful reading is about what actually keeps an alternative listing service alive, a question the largest service raised again when it changed the map everybody used. The ones still standing today are not the ones that were bought and relaunched. Opencaching.de, Opencaching.pl, Opencaching.us and Terracaching all still answer, and what they have in common is that no one is trying to make money from them. They are run by volunteers, for the people who use them, with no exit in mind.

Navicache had the older domain, the bigger database, the search authority and, briefly, owners with a plan and a revenue stream. It is the one that is now a redirect.

The record

• The June 2012 interview with Navicache’s new owners, originally published on this site.
• navicache.com as it stood: April 2012 and January 2022 for the unchanged front page, September 2023 for the gambling site.
• Registry record for navicache.com: created 9 February 2001, expires February 2027.
• Live checks of Opencaching.de, Opencaching.pl, Opencaching.us and Terracaching.