The Nevada Department of Transportation, citing highway safety concerns, removed an estimated 1,000 geocache locations along the Extraterrestrial Highway about two weeks ago, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Adrienne Packer.
The agency’s action has irked geocache fans and the small Nevada towns, hotels and restaurants who depended on their business during the tourism off-season. The geocachers vow to snub Nevada and explore Route 66 instead.
First, an explanation of geocaching, from the folks at Geocaching.com:
Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.
Packer wondered whether the loss of the geocache locations in that region of Nevada made a financial impact. Apparently it has:
Well, last winter Connie West, co-owner of Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, was preparing to shutter her 10-room motel and RV park when convoys of geocachers showed up week after week. She decided not to lay off her housekeeper and hold on to the entire kitchen staff.
“They don’t come in bunches of one. They come in bunches. Bunches,” West said. “They came from Australia, Austria, England because the highway is considered a ‘power cache.’ ” […]
As of March 1, more than 7,000 geocachers had logged their names on the sheet marking the first treasure site along the highway. […]
The impact of the transportation agency’s recent decision to remove the caches has been devastating.
“For the first time in the history of our business, our rooms were booked all winter long,” West said. “Since they removed the caches, we have had every single one of them cancel. They’re not going to come here anymore. All that revenue is going to California.”
NDOT says safety hazards are the reason it removed the geocaches.
Michelle Booth, spokeswoman for the agency, said the caches are hidden right off the shoulder of the highway or even on top of road signs or guard rails.
“People are parking where there isn’t a shoulder,” Booth said. “They’re going 2 mph on a 70 mph highway.” […]
“They’re plowing snow, they can’t see and all of the sudden there is a car parked,” Booth said. “It creates a safety hazard.”
There had to be a better way for NDOT to handle it than this public-relations disaster. Perhaps the agency could have contacted the geocachers and asked them to move the caches to a safer location. Perhaps they could have urged cache hunters to be more considerate and cautious to other motorists.
But this unilateral action by the agency angers many and pleases few.
According to Geocaching.com, the number of geocaches with “Route 66” in their name totals almost 1,000. Many, many more are hidden along the Mother Road. Let Nevada’s case be a cautionary tale to states in Route 66 of being penny-wise in safety and pound-foolish in hospitality.
So…how can we Roadies help promote geocaching on the Mother Road?
I mean, we’ve got the most famous Road-trip in the world, with plenty of places to pull-off the road. Perhaps local businesses could set up and promote their own geocaches to attract visitors, and promote them to Geocache websites, yahoo groups, Facebook sites and other social media. Caches could consist of small Route 66 items. In time, Route 66 could become the most popular geocaching location in the country, and imagine the publicity by adding another reason to travel the Route.
Sound extreme? Consider the rattlesnake ranches and Indian trading posts, …the Cadillac Ranch, etc. Maybe it’s time for a more modern way to get people to stop-in.
Just a thought.
We’ve geocached since 2007, and have cached along Route 66 in Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Common sense must prevail for not only the cacher who places the cache but the cacher hunting for it. We’ve always made certain that safety plays a part in deciding 1. where we place our own cache and 2. where we search for a cache. To place or hunt for one anywhere along the shoulders of a busy highway where there’s either no shoulder or a narrow shoulder just isn’t smart geocaching. The caches we’ve placed are in safe areas, whether it’s a grove of trees in a cemetery, a nature park, or magnetized under a downtown bench.
Geocaching, while seemingly harmless, has obstacles one needs to be aware of. In this day & age of “suspicious behavior”, there are stories of cachers who’ve been put in handcuffs by local police and questioned as to what they’re doing. So needless to say, Nevada isn’t the only geocache-unfriendly place to go. However, if someone wants to be a serious geocacher, they’ll join the online geocaching forums, attend local geocaching events and take note of places one should avoid so you can make your geocaching experience an enjoyable one so you can proceed to use multibillion dollar government satellites to find Tupperware hidden in the woods. 😉
Just FYI – there are geocaches right on Route 66 in Tucumcari, even at some favorite roadie spots! I can understand “some” of their concerns, so at least make sure you’ve got geocaches at all your actual businesses, which is something they can’t dictate to you. Then maybe you could work together for a nearby off the beaten path geocache park sort of thing, with multiple caches in the same location, like within a city park or something?
Having done a portion of the caches along the ET highway, I believe that it is considerably different than along Route 66. The ET Highway is an extremely low traffic highway in the deserts of rural Nevada. Though there are places where safety could be of concern because of the placement of caches, the vast majority of the road lends itself to this type of series because of the low traffic and long straight stretches of roadway. In my opinion, NDOT has been over zealous in its actions concerning this. Removing only the caches placed in areas of safety concern would have been quite adequate while not substantially affecting businesses along the road. I want less government intervention, not more.