Cache Density in your area

[UpNorthTracks]

Just thought I would toss this out there.
At one of our recent icecream meetings, the discussion of cache density came up (I raised it).
As with most cities/towns in the northern part of the province, caches tend to drop off close to none per sq km outside the 30km radius of downtown.
Here in Sudbury, we have a couple hot spots with 6-8 caches per sq km, but most are 2 or 1 per km.
The hot spots are nice, specially with kids. Park the van, and don't return for an hour plus, with more then one "treasure" found.

My question for the forum, how is the cache density in your area?
Are you finding that you are running low in available caches to find?

These are some of the issues we are running into in this area, and I would like to see what others are doing to try to resolve these.

[Wandering_Man]

The subject of cache density has come up numerous times on here and while it seems over and over again that we have too many caches within city limits, we somehow always seem to find room for more.

The one thing I do find nice is the amount of near-urban caching areas that seem to be available to us in the Thunder Bay area. There are plenty of parks and conservation areas around Thunder Bay as well as lots of access points to crown land, all of which seem to proved plenty of great places to hide/search for caches.

[CanadianStock]

Thunder bay is overwelmed with caches and its awsome, everyday after work i can take the same route home and still not be able to get them all after a week of this, 2-3 a day on the car ride home yet their is still more out their, i live about 40 min outside the city and their is still a vast amount of caches in my area, thunder bay has many with only more to come

[UpNorthTracks]

One of the issues we are running into here with cache density is the actual cache count.
I am not sure about Thunder Bay, but here in Sudbury, there appears to be a barrier of approximately 150-175 cache fines. Once you hit this limit, it becomes really tough to continue on without travelling to geocache.
Ultimately, local interest is lost, which results in a lose of local cachers. Fortunately, there has been a health interest in Geocaching, so we have been able to maintain a reasonably consistant size group in this area.

I am working with our local (unofficial) group to try to raise the count, and keep the interest in the game/hobby alive.

[ChrisDom]

NWOG runs a spring and fall cache challenge that has members put out new caches (up to 50 for each event); this has been an excellent way to up the count in our area.  As for promotion, a well publicized CITO event helps get the word out.

[UpNorthTracks]

A major spring and fall event would a good idea for this area.
We do not have any local organization to host these, so maybe this will be something that my wife and myself will consider taking on.
The next up and coming event (The BIG search for LITTLE treasures) will be adding ~40 registered GC.com caches. I believe I am adopting ~10 of these caches. This will be our first event which will see caches being  registered.

[teamvoyagr]

I'm popping in to this forum from Cambridge, Ontario.  We don't have any trouble finding thousands of caches within an hour of two of driving.  We tend to have the opposite problem of too many caches. 

If you are going to try to place caches to increase the count try placing them along a specific theme.  This would help get people out that may have given up on caching.  Down here there is the BFL Bootcamp each year for caches designed to be completed after dark.   That is one theme.  Another might be a series of winter friendly caches.  I can only imagine how much more of a hassle it is creating winter friendly caches up there.

Another idea would be to create some kind of a challenge series.  A cache a day might be tricky if you are already running out of caches but something like that.  Maybe day of the week caches.   

Just some suggestions.  Hopefully you can keep people interested.

[shroomAzoom]

Thanks for the neat suggestions. We do have a couple cacheing challenges each year, but I'm guessing ours our different from what you mean. Care to elaborate? Also, I'm curious about these day of the week caches. What are they about?

[jleecollins]

There are a fair number of Challenge Caches in Southern Ontario - I am working on a few and have completed a couple.

Some of the Challenge Caches are by our favourite cache reviewer, CacheDrone using his geocaching name "The Blue Quasar"