Geocaching 101: What is a Geocaching Trackable?

One aspect that we enjoy about Geocaching around the world is Geocaching Trackables.  Geocaching Trackables are tags or coins with a code on it that you can log and track your miles as it travels from cache to cache.  It’s fun to send them out into the world to see where they go.  You can drop them in a geocache & another cacher may pick it up & move it elsewhere.  Geocaching trackables come in many different shapes and sizes, and you can even make your own trackable!

What is a Geocaching Trackable? 

A Geocaching Trackable is a tag with a geocaching code that you attach to an item and placed in a cache or taken with you from cache to cache. This allows you to track your geocaching trackable through your Geocaching profile.  The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online.

Geocaching Trackables Are a Nice Surprise

We always find it fun running up to find a geocache and finding a geocaching trackable in there. It is fun to see where it has been.  It can be a real surprise when you look it up and see how many miles may have on it.  We have run across some trackables that looked worn but only had a couple of hundred miles on them.  Then a brand new looking trackable may have hundreds of thousands of miles on it.

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Geocaching Trackables can be used in many ways

We use Geocaching trackables in several ways.  Not only do we move other cacher’s trackables from cache to cache (to keep it on its journey), but we have other kinds of geocaching trackables too.  We have a keychain trackable that we keep with us at all times.  It has a code on it and we log it online along with all of the caches we discover; that way we can keep track of how many miles we have accumulated during our geocaching travels!

We also have a car trackable (a magnet with a code on it); however, we don’t log it while caching in and around our home of Atlanta, GA.  We mainly use it to log our road trip caches so that we can easily look back on fun caches and reminisce about road trips that we have taken.

One of our favorite Geocaching trackables that we take along with us is our patch trackable on my backpack so that we can log caches that we have found while backpacking around the world.  There are a lot of miles on this trackable, and we look forward to adding many more to it.  This year alone we have added up over 25,000 miles on our patch trackable in 2013.

Send out your own Geocaching Trackables

There is joy in both discovering and sending out geocaching trackables into the world.  We have sent out a few ourselves and watched online as they are moved around the world.  In fact, we sent out a koozie from our wedding weekend in Key West.  We dropped it out at a Geocaching Mega Event in Savannah, GA and after some time went by, we saw that it made its way all the way to Hawaii!  One of our goals is to find this koozie again; we hope to pick it up somewhere in the world, have a toast with it, and send it back out to continue traveling.

There have been stories of trackables making their way back to its owners.  We have also read about trackables that rounded the globe over three to four times, and ended up 45 miles away from the owner! A cool story indeed.  Once you log the trackable you may get an icon that is stored on your profile forever.  It’s so much fun acquiring icons from trackables.

Keep the Geocaching Trackables Moving Along

We love discovering so many different types of Trackables from caching around the world.  We try to do our best when discovering and picking up geocaching trackables in helping move them toward their goals.  When picking up trackables make sure you don’t keep them too long, they are meant to keep moving around the world so the owner can see where it has been.  So do your part when picking up and discovering trackables and keep them moving, so others can discover the history of the trackable.

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