Geocaching Statistics

Morgan has been keen to do some geocaches lately and as it’s a great excuse to get out into the great outdoors and have a bit of a walk I’ve been more than happy to take him.

We started geocaching in September 2006 and at the time quite liked it as it took us to places we’d never been before, even within our local area. We never went completely mad with it, just doing caches here and there when they popped up near to us, or if we were having a weekend away we’s sometimes try to fit one in For some people it is all about the numbers and they try to fit in as many as possible. That’s fine but it was never like that for us – Although, it has to be said once you start doing a few it is nice to see how many you can find in a day!

Someone on my local geocaching website recently asked what peoples most common finds were in terms of difficulty and terrain rating, which prompted me to look into our stats. I used to use an online service for this called ‘Its not about the numbers’ but that has been closed, so I’ve just downloaded a little application called GCStatistic that does the same job.

GCStatistics works on a Mac and there are also Windows and Linux versions available. You simply enter in your geocaching.com username and password and the application retrieves a .gpx file from the gecoaching.com servers that contains all of your gecoaching history. From this it works out all of your stats and generates an xHTML based view of these stats as a combination of charts, lists and maps. (Although the map images seem to be broken at the moment?)

As you would expect from someone who has gone to the trouble of building such an application there are more stats in there than you can shake a stick at! It will show you your finds per year, month, milestones, finds by cache type, cache container, cache owner, finds per country, difficulty rating, terrain rating, distance from you home and much much more. There are a default set of stats but if you wish you can change which ones you see and you can edit which aspects of these stats are presented. You can then upload these stats to your geocaching profile or copy the xHTML for inclusion wherever you wish. Ours are shown here – Geocaching Statistics.

Sample Geocaching Stats

Sample Geocaching Stats

As you can see, we did quite a few caches in 2007 and 2008 but once we’d exhausted all of the local caches and had to drive a fair way to get to new ones we slowed down considerably throughout 2009. However, there are now loads of new caches in the local area and with Morgan’s increased enthusiasm for geocaching we’re likely to start finding a few more again.

2 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author Alan says:

    I’ve just been trying out an online geocaching stats app too:
    http://www.mygeocachingprofile.com/

    You can see our stats output here:
    https://www.alananna.co.uk/blog/more-geocaching-stats/

    I’m not sure which one I prefer yet, although I do like the UK counties section in this latest one.

    Al.

  2. Avatar forComment Author Alan says:

    Whilst working on the printed version of our Weblog Book I came across this post, so have just updated our geocaching stats which can be seen here:

    https://www.alananna.co.uk/blog/geocaching-stats/

    Al.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.