Cache Adoptions – Clearing the Area

Out of pure morbid curiosity, we ran a Pocket Query on “temporarily disabled” caches in the 20 mi. radius around Thousand Oaks this weekend just to see how many caches were disabled in the area. Wow, were we shocked. There were at least 100. This area is certainly very cache-heavy thanks to the popularity of caching and the abundance of hiking trails around here. It's expected to have a bunch of caches disabled, but as we inspected further many had 3-4 DNF's while others hadn't seen any activity for over 2 years!

We kicked out a few emails to the notable cache owners offering to perform a cache adoption to renew the area, and found that a few members had moved out of town and were in disparate need of some adoption pals. 24 hours later, and we were shocked to find ourselves the owners of four (4) caches – two (2) that needed serious maintenance, and one that had been muggled.

Here's the links to these four (4) caches: GCT1PD, GCT2TV, GCRCWJ, & GCKEZV.

The first two caches are part of a series, and the other two are the disabled caches. All four were owned by two different people, each had moved out of town and could no longer manage the upkeep. Now we've only got 46 finds at the time of this posting so we are a bit cache-placement-heavy for our own liking. Adopting caches is something that shouldn't be taken lightly. Unfortunately, few members who leave the area take the time to mention that a cache needs adoption and as a result the cache deteriorates in quality. True, while it may still exist, cachers don't traditionally enjoy opening a cache full of rust only to find a ton of junk.

A perfect example of this was one of the first caches I'd ever found called “Tattoo You at Sunset and E (since archived). It was a crappy AOL tin case full of moisture and covered in soot. Yes, the black stuff from your chimney. Cachers don't usually mind getting dirty, but this thing was placed in a garbage location and it was a park and grab cache. Turned out the owner hadn't been to this cache in over a year.. it showed.