Originally Submitted by dethme0w on Sat, 01/31/2015

Last weekend, the me0ws had the rare pleasure of handling and re-hiding a moving cache!

GCDB76 “Jacob’s Moving Cache #3” landed on Vancouver Island from a trip to Hawaii some time last month, and made its way down island to Greater Victoria.  It has been all over North America in its 12 years of existence.  When a local cacher hid it under a hedge in Esquimalt, I swooped in to make the grab on this rare jewel!  We then had all night and the next morning to check out the cache’s generous contents.  We discovered 7 trackables (including a Girl Guides of Canada 100th anniversary geocoin!), we made three trades, and we even put some pictures (and a link to this blog) on a travelling SD card in the TB bag!  There’s nothing in caching like being able to check out a great cache like this in detail on your coffee table.

Moving caches, of course, are not allowed anymore, but like most early caching concepts that later came to be rejected, existing moving caches were allowed to continue as grandfathered types.  Thus, this one is still travelling the caching world!

The problem is that the CO has expressed interest in retiring this cache, and because it’s a grandfathered type, it cannot be adopted!

This has led to many comments on the cache page asking the CO to keep the cache going, but as some have pointed out, this could be putting undue pressure on the CO to do something he doesn’t want to do.  It’s totally his right not to continue making frequent updates to the coordinates, or pushing cachers who are not moving the cache along to do so.  Moving caches are high maintenance, which is one of the good reasons why Groundspeak grandfathered them out.

But this cache has been enjoyed by far more cachers than the average geocache.  Moving caches bring with them the excitement of racing to be the next finder; since the location changes with every find, finding a moving cache is kind of like an FTF!  Cachers have been taking excellent care of this one too, probably because they usually take it home where any needed TLC can be done in comfort and where trades can be done with consideration and with the cacher’s full resources on hand.  So it would be a shame to just let it go.

The solution, I think, is not to push JacobBarlow to keep maintaining a cache he’s grown weary of maintaining after all these years, but to pressure Groundspeak to make an exception for the this cache to the prohibition on adoption.  There are many cachers lined up who have loved this cache and would love to pick up the baton and help keep it going! Groundspeak has waived its rules in exceptional circumstances in the past without creating a precedent that they would live to regret, and I think that this cache is one of those exceptional circumstances.

Keep Jacob’s cache moving!

EDIT October 2021:

Sadly, Geocaching HQ decided in May 2017 to end the grandfathered status of all moving caches and archived this one (and all others!), effectively turning it into a trackable.  Prior to that (and not long after we found and re-hid it ourselves), owner JacobBarlow decided that the only way he could sustain the cache was to restrict its movement to his home state of Utah.  The cache was last found October 20, 2016.  Thanks Jacob for the huge effort in maintaining and keeping track of this one for 14 years!