Helping The Newbies – Building A Guide

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

For cachers who have been into the game of geocaching for awhile, you tend to take certain pieces of knowledge for granted. Things like what trackables are, what the general FTF guidelines might be, and other aspects of the game that you just picked up along the way as you played. All of those little things you learned you now find yourself doing without even thinking twice about it. When newbies come along and aren’t aware of the general practices of an area, they have to learn all of this new stuff from scratch. Many times some of us seasoned cachers may even get a little put off or annoyed by what we consider “newbie” mistakes. Generally we offer good advice and try to help out as best as we can, but in many cases, the new cachers simply have not been exposed to the right people or situations to be “in the know” about how things work.

Milosheart mentioned to me recently that it might not be a bad idea to try and put together a “Welcome To Geocaching” pack that would contain a multitude of information that would help cachers ease some of that newbie pain they might experience as they start off. Geocaching.com has a great deal of information, as do the forums, but a lot of the time, the things that really matter either are buried in with all the junk, or are simply things that don’t get addressed typically. Cache Up NB also has some good resources for people who are just starting in the world of caching (I will admit that some of it needs updating) but for cachers who are brand new, it might not be a bad idea to put together something that can be easily downloaded and read and gives them the jist of all the little things that we all take for granted. Cut out all of the extra marketing garbage and just get to the point of caching.

I’ve put together a very modest list of some of the things I think would be useful in such a pack. It is by no means a complete list, but it is a start. I wanted to solicit some feedback from some of our readers to see what things you’d like to see included in such a resource. In fact, I encourage newbie cachers to comment and tell us what things would have been useful for you to know off the bat.

I’ll compile all of the information together and use it to try and build us a nice pack to give to new cachers. Here’s the list I started:

• Geocaching.com Basics
• Finding caches
• Map basics
• Notifications
• Watchlists
• Best practices
• Hiding caches
• Best practices
• Good/bad containers
• Attributes
• Guideline basics
• Trackable basics
• Geocaching Jargon (TFTC, FTF, TNLNSL, etc)
• Associations / Websites
• Municipal caching challenges / tours
• Caching related software (GSAK, EasyGPS)
• GPS Navigation Basics (accuracy, etc)
• Logging of caches / FTFs / Best practices (why we write longer logs, what an FTF is supposed to be, etc)
• Mentors
• Map basics
• NB specific caching knowledge (winter friendly, types of containers, water issues, etc)

Please go ahead and post comments that contain additional things you think should be included.