The Seattle Parks Department has ordered the removal of all geocaches from Discovery Park, partly on the basis of "social trails" created by people searching for caches. They have apparently not yet set their sights on letterboxes (there is not yet any order to remove boxes), but they do know about them, and I wouldn't be surprised if they start logging onto Atlas Quest to see what's in the park. If they can figure out the location of a box, I expect they would go out and confiscate it, no matter how harmless. (I recently found a couple of boxes there. One poses no risk of social trails or any other kind of damage, but another one probably will result in the kind of social trail that has the parks people agitated.) At this point, some cachers have attempted to work with the parks people, but they are closed-minded and won't consider allowing caches back in the park anytime soon. That arrogance has me convinced that sooner or later they will go after any letterboxes they can identify.

I did email the owners of boxes I know about in Discovery Park, but thought I'd get the word out a little more broadly in case I missed any. I would say that, if the park orders the removal of letterboxes, we should all comply. However, that has not happened yet, and it might be wise to make boxes in the park a bit more obscure - maybe add an F-count requirement or something.

If you're interested, there is an active discussion of the Discovery Park issue on the geocaching forum:

http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=177879

Jeff

I thought that, as you said before, when the parks department says "geocaches" they mean geocaches, letterboxes, terracaches, and all other similar objects. Aren't they, therefore, already asking that letterboxes be removed now?

ClioMouse

Thanks for letting us know!
I have one all ready to plant that I was going to put there.

Guess I'll have to find another place :(

The HH hostel may need adjusting - it's really neat and I'd hate to see it go missing.

So why are they so closed-minded about geocaching anyway?
There's trails all over the place, and it used to be a military base in the middle of the city - not exactly a pristine wilderness.

Mariette

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I thought that, as you said before, when the parks department says "geocaches" they mean geocaches, letterboxes, terracaches, and all other similar objects. Aren't they, therefore, already asking that letterboxes be removed now?

Good question. The Washington State Parks regulation (a formal, written policy with the force of law) defines "geocaches" to include letterboxes, etc. But Discovery Park is not a state park, but a City of Seattle Park, so the state regulation does not apply. In this case, I know through a series of public records requests to the City that they have not adopted any kind of formal written policy (and they claim not to be considering one). Rather, they simply decided to request/demand (it's not clear which) the removal of all "geocaches" in the park. That request/demand was apparently made to Groundspeak, which runs the geocaching.com site, and Groundspeak's reviewers complied, archiving all of the caches. (Parks people did indicate that they would be removing any caches they found.) So, there has not yet been a formal statement that letterboxes are forbidden in Discovery Park, but I have no doubt that, if they know about one and find it (including putting forth the effort to do so ;) ), they will take it.

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I have one all ready to plant that I was going to put there. Guess I'll have to find another place :(

Or, if you want to plant in Discovery Park and avoid detection (again, it is not illegal - at least not yet), maybe make the location obscure and/or impose an F-count requirement.

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The HH hostel may need adjusting - it's really neat and I'd hate to see it go missing.

Definitely. I believe it is very much at risk given how easy it is to find, and the way in which it is hidden. Unfortunately, it probably needs to move outside the park.

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So why are they so closed-minded about geocaching anyway? There's trails all over the place, and it used to be a military base in the middle of the city - not exactly a pristine wilderness.

I know. It's pretty ironic, given the extensive military housing, tennis courts, visitor's centers, picnic areas, sewer treatment plant, etc. - it's far from an untouched wilderness. Although the parks people initially claimed that they found "a geocaching item hidden in an active owl's nest," they could produce no documentation of such a thing actually occurring (and one cacher pointed out that that kind of owl is non-native, aggressive towards native species and so probably should not be encouraged to nest in the park anyway). They pretty quickly backed away from that justification, and I believe their main focus now is on social trails - those little unofficial trails we create when caches and boxes are hidden off of designated trails. There has been a focus on eliminating such trails (not just those related to boxes and caches, but those created by other users of the park) in Discovery Park, and that goal is probably reasonable. But it does not require a total ban on hidden boxes. Two boxes I found in the park (I won't identify them because the fact that they are in the park is not clear from their descriptions) were hidden in ways that eliminate any risk of a social trail developing.

As to why they are closed-minded, I don't know. I might cynically suggest that there is a good proportion of public land managers that have the arrogance to think the land belongs to them, that they know better than the unwashed masses, and they therefore shouldn't have to be open-minded. Geocaching was the obvious first target because the locations of all but puzzle caches are determinable with certainty (those pesky GPS coordinates), and because that site probably generates the vast majority of traffic hunting for hidden stuff.

As I mentioned above, Seattle claims there is no larger, more formal policy in the works - that Discovery Park is a special case. We can hope that's true, but again, the cynic in me comes out: I think the land managers will not be able to resist "managing," and I fear we will eventually see something more formal and widespread. I keep thinking it behooves cachers and letterboxers to put aside any difference (I think they are really, really small anyway) and join up to advocate for these activities with land managers. I'm not quite sure how to accomplish that, but I keep thinking about it. :)