The Lonely TB Project

When I was living and geocaching in New Mexico, I discovered one of the coolest geocaching stats sites ever, the Deep Southwest Geocaching Project. Some computer savy geocachers in Arizona came up with a point system for geocaches that gives older, seldom found caches high points. Basically, a geocache is worth a certain amount of points based on how long it has been around. Every geocacher who has found that cache gets an equal share of those points. Thus, the old but very frequently found geocaches are not worth many points, nor are the very new but seldom found caches. It turns out, this point method is very good at identifying lonely caches, those that have been around a while, but just aren't found often. While lonely caches can take many forms, the majority of them are in remote areas that are hard to get to: the kind of geocaches I like to find.

The site went belly-up shortly after I discovered it, but it has been reincarnated as the Lonely Cache Project (or LCP for short, again by some cachers in Arizona). You can read more about the point system at that site (link). I checked in (and still check sometimes even though I no longer live in the regions served by the LCP) on the site frequently, sometimes using it to find cool lonely cache destinations, and sometimes just to see who else is finding these caches. I was hooked. But as I mentioned, the LCP only monitors for the mountain west, and now I live in Tennessee. Guess I'll have to find some other way to look for the lonely ones around here.

I did have a little foresight though and created a handful of TBs to hunt Lonely Caches for me. I give you, The Lonely TB Project or LTBP. Now I can live vicariously, if not very infrequently, through there journeys. Below is a table of the Lonely Cache Hunters I put out and some interesting stats. If they move a bit more, I may even throw together a chart. One interesting stat is the accumulated LCPs. I count the number of CPs a cache has at the time the bug is left (excluding the geocacher(s) that just found it). IN this way you can see which TB gets to the loneliest caches. For the purposes of this chart, I only count a cache as a lonely one if it has at least 25 CPs at the time of visit.

Name	Track	Lonely Caches visited	Accumulated LCPs	Current Location	Interesting Notes
DNBOE lonely cache hunter	TB4KGCR	7	625	Eagle's Roost Peak	My first of these that was actually moved to a new lonely cache. It was picked up by tlepinski in 2020 and moved to another very lonely spot.
Lonely Cache Hunter: Hollow Point	TB56QGV	9	792	Raven's Puzzle Cache	Moved by tlepinski in 2020 after sitting in a cache I had left it in back in 2014!
Lonely Cache Hunter: Shark	TB4J2AN	7	380	Desert Canyon Overlook	Moved by tlepinksi in 2020.
The Turtle Lonely Cache Visitor	TB54TD3	10	616	GC1V9XF, Serpent Lake	Was moved around a lot by SirChrisRey, but for health reasons he ended up mailing it back to me. I placed it at Serpent Lake

Update January 2021

As of the beginning of 2021, all these TBs are still alive, although they barely have moved. They lay dormant for several years in the caches I had placed them in, until tlepinski got active again in 2020 and found the three of them that hadn't moved since I dropped them off back in 2014. After 6 years lonely, they all got moved to a new cache! We'll see if they get moved again any time soon. The Turtle Lonely Cache Visitor is still in Serpent lake in northern NM, where I dropped it off in 2018.