It’s been a few years since I’ve taken a close look at the Geocaching website. The mobile app gives me the full toolkit I need to find and log caches, so I’ve never felt the need to go online. On a whim I took a look yesterday, and all I can say is “WOW.”
To preface, I need to admit that there’s a big component of personal preference here. I’m the kind of guy who loves collecting and exploring stats to come up with neat little facts. I really enjoy watching a story appear out of the data and I keep a few Google sheets with some random analyses I put together on escape rooms. So imagine my surprise when I discover that Geocaching.com has a number of dashboards and reports pre-built to summarize exactly the kinds of visualizations I crave.
A few of the highlights:
-A map of the US showing the count of caches by state
-A map of the world showing count of caches by country
-A map of each continent showing counts of caches by country
-Charts over time showing volume discovered per month
-Northernmost/Easternmost/Westernmost/Southernmost cache found
-Longest streak of days with a cache
My dad and I partner together on our Geocaching account, so it was shocking to see we had a year in which we only found 18. Also, Hawaii and Alaska have our 4th and 7th highest counts of caches found. We’re also not nearly as geographically diverse with our caches as I am with my escape room visits.
I could go on for days picking out fun facts like this. And I think I will. I’ve been texting some of these fun facts to my dad every time I have a chance to look at this.
There’s a bigger point to be made here about how stats can be used to celebrate victories, but I’ll summarize those thoughts another day. For now, I’ll just leave you with another random fact- we tend to find more caches in March than in any other month!
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