Geocoin Challenges: Rinse, Wash, Repeat

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

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.