Maintaining Your Geocaches

One of the responsibilities of being a Geocache Owner is maintaining your geocaches. When you hide a cache, you make a commitment to keep it in good shape. We've all seen geocaches that have had no love from their owners in a long time, and that's no fun!

There are several types of cache maintenance

1. Routine maintenance and checking up on your geocaches – a change of seasons is a great time to do this
2. Responding to a “needs maintenance” log – going out to fix a specifically mentioned problem

Some tasks to perform when maintaining your geocaches

• Make sure the container is still water-tight
• Remove any junk, debris, useless swag, dirt
• Wipe out any water or dampness
• Make sure the log-sheet has plenty of space
• Re-fill with some nice swag

One of our club members, crs98, posted some great cache maintenance tips which we shared on a recent show.

Important things to think about when maintaining your geocaches:

• Replace plain paper logs with Rite-in-the-Rain or other water resistant paper logs.
• Use thicker plastic bags which are much more resistant to tearing. I recommend using 6mil thick bags for small or regular size caches. You can get them in bulk quantity from Amazon or many other retailers for not much money in many different sizes. Pick a couple of different sizes and then share some with your friends.
• Replace o-rings in bison-tubes, nano caches, and matchstick containers. I recommend the use of Buna rubber as the o-ring material of choice for geocaching because it holds up to the elements well but is much more resistant to tearing than silicone o-rings.
• Airtight food storage containers (like Lock-and-lock) are great, but they do degrade over time, especially if they are exposed to UV sunlight. The usual place that they break is on the closures. Make sure that yours are in good shape and not already degrading before summer starts.
• Don't forget to replace the SWAG! Clean out old junk that is moldy or not in good shape and make sure containers that are capable of holding something have good stuff. We have a lot of new geocachers with kids because of the pandemic and it's always much more encouraging to find good stuff in a cache.
• Plan on making regular visits to caches, even if nobody has reported a problem. Maybe it needs a little TLC anyway or maybe nobody has logged a DNF even if they can't find it (my personal gripe) and it really is missing.

Thanks to crs98 for those helpful tips. What about you? Do you have any cache maintenance tips, tricks or procedures that you’d like to share?  We'd love to hear about it!