People geocache for many reasons. Some to challenge themselves. Some to validate themselves by being better than others. Some just to explore. I still don’t understand cachers with tens of thousands of finds, and I can’t stand challenge caches of the “find 200 caches in a day” variety. Perhaps if I had been caching full-time at my current rate since the game started I’d have close to a 5-digit find count, but it’s never been about the numbers for me. I cache to get outside when I’d prefer to stay inside. And I cache to explore the vast beauty of creation (hence my recent Instagram account). Sure, I’m working on the Fizzy and Jasmer grids, but I won’t be heartbroken if I never find them all.

But I learned about an interesting challenge last year which is well in line with my exploration motivation: find a cache whose bearing is each of the 360 degrees around a certain location. Usually this is the site of the challenge cache, but you can always make personal challenges. So I set out to find caches every degree away from home! As a bonus, I got to play around with HTML5 canvas drawing and can now generate a neat pie chart (I love visual representations). Green wedges are degrees I’ve found, and yellow wedges represent an unfound cache that is within 30 miles of home. Red means I must expand my search a little farther out!

We knew that moving to Cedar Falls would open a much wider opportunity for geocaching, as Dodgeville is somewhat of a sinkhole on the geocaching map – not a whole lot of activity. As you can see, I have many fewer “found degrees” (oriented towards Wisconsin where I’ve done the majority of my caching), but on the flipside, I’ll be able to mostly complete this challenge locally!

After this, it’s onto the “distance” bands! (Find a cache within every 5-mile band up to … whatever distance, usually 500miles). Probably not. It’ll be more exploratory to continue to check-off counties. I had almost given up on Wisconsin, but a future planned work retreat to the northwoods makes collecting all the Wisconsin counties an attainable goal.

Cache on!