The Caching Riding Mountain folks sure know how to put together a marketing program. Surely the MBGA can put a spin on the good community and environmental work that it does to qualify for some funding too.

The first Caching Riding Mountain cache was listed on March 22: CRM-001- Former Water Tower but last I heard they were still working on getting their website going (supposed to be soon) and making sure the other caches are set up. Kitekacher is project lead on the whole thing from Parks Canada, working with George and Val from Friends of Riding Mountain and the Riding Mountain Biosphere Reserve. Dani just met Kitekacher (Richard) last weekend at the policy workshop in Ottawa.

I think it will be challenging for many of the communities to set up geocaches, even with the training workshops they received, without having spent much time finding caches. Finding interesting caches tends to stimulate the imagination and creative juices in order to make more interesting hides. But we will have to see how it turns out, perhaps many more cachers will emerge from the effort.

We were up at Riding Mountain on the weekend and they ran a small gps scavenger hunt around the townsite which was fun. They had Gekos on hand and were loaning them out and explaining how they worked to people. The thing I found odd is they had all their coordinates in UTM format.

One of the ladies taking care of the scavenger hunt was expressed disapponitment in the website because it was supposed to be 100% complete for the long weekend and it was not.

Had a good chat this afternoon with Val who is the sole employee of the Riding Mountain Biosphere Reserve and the current lead on the whole Caching Riding Mountain program, and they have managed to get their website to a point they are somewhat happy with. I was trying to convince her that they really need to marry up the lofty visions of Tourism Manitoba, Parkland Tourism and Caching Riding Mountain with the Manitoba Geocaching Association who has the on the ground expertise.

Currently they are even looking to potentially expand the program outside of the biosphere reserve and into the rest of the province, putting on more workshops to build community capacity.

While we were talking, Richard (KiteCacher, formerly RMNPVisitorCentre) who works next to me, interjected an excellent idea. What if rather than Caching Riding Mountain maintaining a site pointing to caches it approves, it creates a standard for content/educational value for caches that can be applied for, and if approved, can be identified on the geocaching.com (or any other listing service for that matter) cache page. That way individuals setting up caches can identify tourism objectives or learning outcomes that they can contribute to and thereby create more meaninful caches. If the cache meets the objective a logo/seal of approval can link to a more generic site that identifies the broader program.

In fact, a single cache could accomplish many broader objectives and be inclusive of all the programs it impacts. A cache in a provincial park could be part of their provincial caching series, a biosphere highlight, a municipal gem, a national historic spot, etc, etc,... and be stamped with approval by all those that apply. That does not preclude a cache which is simply a cache for cache sake, but people can choose different series for interest and learning.

Thoughts ,

Dragonfreys