Trackables: travel bugs and geocoins

The idea, and why it is unusual

Most of geocaching is a transaction between two people who never meet: an owner hides something, a finder finds it, and the exchange is complete.

A trackable is different. It is a small, open-ended request made to strangers: take this somewhere, log where you took it, pass it on: with no enforcement of any kind and no way to check whether it is being honoured. It works entirely on the willingness of people who gain nothing from participating.

Seen that way, the surprising thing is not that most trackables stop moving. It is that so many keep going, for years, across continents, carried by hundreds of people who had no reason to bother.

What these pages cover

Two pages. The first is about failure, because that is where the useful information is: trackables mostly stall rather than being stolen, they stall at identifiable points, and a few habits on the finder’s side change the odds substantially.

The second is about the far end of the distribution, the objects people have attached codes to when they decided a tag on a keyring was insufficiently interesting.

The etiquette in one paragraph

Take it, move it, log it, promptly.

A trackable is not a trade item and taking one is not a find. Hold it for days rather than months. Move it toward whatever its goal says, if you reasonably can. Log the code when you take it and again when you drop it. And if it is lost, damaged or you have simply had it too long, say so, the owners of these things want the record to be true far more than they want it to be flattering.

What a trackable actually is, mechanically

The confusion that produces most of the etiquette failures is a mechanical one, so it is worth setting out plainly.

Every trackable has a public code, printed or stamped on the object, and a private activation code known only to the owner. The public code is what a finder logs. It says this item was here, on this date, carried by this person. The private code exists so that nobody can activate or steal ownership of an item they merely found.

The consequence is that logging a trackable does not require permission, an account relationship or any contact with the owner. You read the code, you log it, and the item’s page updates. The whole arrangement runs on the assumption that people will do this: nothing forces them, nothing checks, and no notification chases anyone who does not.

That is why the failures in this section are failures of attention rather than of access. Nobody is locked out; people simply forget.

Discover, retrieve, drop

Three log types do almost all the work, and mixing them up is the second most common mistake after holding an item too long.

Discover records that you saw the item without taking it. It is the right log when a trackable is displayed at an event, attached to somebody’s bag, or sitting in a cache you are not going to move it from.

Retrieve records that you have taken it out of a cache and now hold it. This is the log that starts the clock, and it is the one people skip when they are in a hurry, which is precisely how an item vanishes from the record while sitting in somebody’s coat.

Drop records that you have placed it in a specific cache. Doing this at the moment you place it, rather than that evening, is what keeps the trail accurate for whoever picks it up next.

Goals that work and goals that do not

Every trackable carries a stated goal, and the goal is the strongest single predictor of how far the item gets.

Goals that work are legible in one line and achievable by accident. Travel west. Visit mountains. Reach the sea. A finder standing in a cache with a trackable in their hand has about ten seconds of attention to give it, and a goal they can satisfy by doing what they were already going to do is a goal that gets satisfied.

Goals that fail ask for coordination. Reach a specific town by a specific date, be photographed with a particular kind of landmark, visit these fourteen countries in this order. Each condition narrows the set of people who can help, and the narrowing compounds. An item that needs the right person in the right place at the right time mostly waits for all three.

The pattern generalises. A trackable is a request made to strangers with no way to enforce it, and the requests that get honoured are the ones that cost nothing to honour.

Releasing one, if you decide to

Two decisions at the start do most of the work.

Attach the code to something that survives. Trackables live in damp containers, in coat pockets and in car footwells for years. A metal tag on a split ring outlasts nearly everything else; anything paper, printed or glued has a short life. If the object is sentimental, it is worth accepting now that you are unlikely to see it again. That is not a risk of releasing a trackable, it is the normal outcome.

Release it where it will be picked up. A busy cache near a road, with a steady run of recent logs, moves an item within days. A remote hide with four finds a year is where trackables go to sit, however good the goal is.

After that, the honest advice is to stop watching. Items go quiet for months and then reappear three countries away. The ones that never reappear are more numerous, and an owner who expected that from the start tends to enjoy the whole thing considerably more.