Geocoin Challenges: Rinse, Wash, Repeat
Over the course of the last 10 years, geocachers from New Brunswick have had ample opportunity to collect geocoins from countless challenges. From Fundy National Park to the most recent Riverview Winter Carnival series, caching in NB has become synonymous with coin challenges throughout the year. We’ve been extremely lucky that these challenges are even available when in many other regions, they are a rarity. It seems that every few months another challenge seems to pop up and before you know it, you’re off and running to collect a few more smileys for the sake of snagging a free coin. But it begs to ask the question, what can be done to keep these challenges interesting.
When Rev Slippery hid the caches for Riverview’s winter challenge, he opted to place most of them on the snowshoe trail at the Dobson. This was quite a departure from the last few rounds we’ve had with this challenge. It seemed to garner a lot of positive feedback as many had not done that portion of the trail in awhile, or at all. This seemed to keep the challenge fresh despite the fact that it was all too familiar. Go find X amount of caches and snag a coin.
If you look at the province, here’s a list of the recurring coin challenges we’ve seen:
Fundy National Park
Kouchibouguac National Park
Saint John Ex (now discontinued)
Moncton (now discontinued)
Riverview Sunfest
Riverview Winter Carnival
Riverview Harvest Festival
Other challenges we’ve also seen in the province include:
Fredericton Geocaching Tour
Falls Brook Centre Challenge
Tri-City Geocoin Challenge (M3 Mega)
Capturing The Bay
Sentier NB Trails
Village of Petitcodiac
March of the 104th
Kings Landing
Great War Geocaching Project
Irishtown Park Geocoin Challenge
I’m not sure if there have been other challenges as well but even just looking at this list, you can see that our province is not without a serious amount of geocoin challenges.
With the new year here, and more challenges to come out as the months go by, I’d be curious to get some feedback from those of you who have participated in some of these. What do you find works the best and what would you like to see changed? Do you have any ideas about how we can make the repeat challenges more interesting as opposed to the hide/archive/repeat pattern we see happening in some regions.
Please post your thoughts on these challenges in the comments below.
I really like the variety of the challenges, some require lots of time, effort and gas while others only require a part of your day. Many people cache for many different reasons and it is nice to have coin challenges that cater to as many as possible. Not everyone can travel all day or multiple trips to get a single coin and some people like to do the short quick ones with young children. The ones that I do for the town of Riverview are made for families to do, easy to find and take about an hour to complete, that is the goal and what the town wants it to be. The capturing the Bay series takes you to four big attractions along the Fundy coast that will take all day and require you to enter four parks to collect a coin, very different challenges for very different people and outcomes.The town semi-annual challenges are the toughest to do as there is only so many places to hide caches and so much you can do other than find caches but they still get people out finding with a little reward.
Just like caches, you don’t have to do them all only the ones you like, some are easy and some are hard.