Maybe There Should Be a Souvenir for Images Posted...

Finding caches used to be "about the journey." Now the numbers seem to be king. Has anyone noticed uploading images at cache finds no longer seems to be an activity. As we found the caches in bd's fun state series in PA State Gamelands 69, we noticed there were few images uploaded on any of the cache pages unless they were ours.

Yesterday we enjoyed the Saturday of our holiday weekend by hiking in Elk State Forest. The Fred Woods Trail is home to the cache Dobby's Home. The August 2001 cache is one of the older caches in the state and has a 40 percent favorite rating (43/233). The hike includes great rock formations and a at least one vista (two if you do the loop). The 233 finders have posted 208 images. It sounds impressive, but the last image was posted by us on a return visit in June 2013. Almost five years have passed with no images posted, not even a selfie.

In a time when nearly all cachers have cell phones and nearly all phones have reasonable image ablities, adding an image to a log is easy. Have the next few finds become so important and the presence of so many mediocre caches become so large that the memories of a wonderful journey are just blurred and not worth a picture? In the 2018 specialty world of one person driving, one person navigating, one person jumping from the vehicle for caches on the right side of the road, and one person jumping from the vehicle for caches on the left side of the road, it would seem someone would have time for an image or two.

This is my post from our July 2009 visit to the area. This is from June 2013.

For yesterday's visit, we did enjoy the rocks again.

We stopped by the second overlook...

and Ali spotted an orchid.

We also were third to find on a new cache on the trail and will post images to our log.