Hiking Melbourne

A couple of days after my last geocaching post Groundspeak announced an " introduce a friend " scheme. What a coincident. Basically a virtual badge will be added to your profile, if you're going caching with a muggle friend. I think nobody is under delusion that this will change the general trend but it seems to be more of a test. Groundspeak must be aware of the current downwards trend which begs the question: How did we get here? First let's have a look at other outdoor activities before we jump to any conclusions. Maybe outdoorsy things are going down in general and this is just how things are these days? Nope. That's not it. Everyone else is doing fine and hiking seems to be great. We do like that :) If you translate the search terms into German, the picture remains similar. Looking at the simple word "outdoor" the whole thing gets summed up quite nicely: Do you see Christmas time in there every year? Keep in mind this is only a ...

If you are a trailrunner, mountaineer or just an eager hiker, you heard this name before: Mount Juliet. At a little bit over 1100m this is the steepest training hike around Melbourne. Yes there higher mountains, yes there are longer walk but no there's nothing which can compete with the elevation profile of this little gem.  The roughly 930m of vertical ascent you have to cover stretch over only 4.3km and almost 700m are hidden in the last 2km. Yes the elevation profile looks like a sadistic mathematician's creation. It's the 1000 steps times four. If you read various blogs about Mt. Juliet it's always the same verdict: This is a dumb idea unless you want to punish yourself. Judging be the state of the track - fairly well - a lot of people do exactly that: Punish themselves.  In 1910 Nicholas Caire described the summit with these words: "A trigonometrical station. The highest and about the most accessible mountain near Healesville, from the top of which a...

If you make any claim you have to back it up by cold hard facts. There might be something like a perceived truth which you can find widely across one nation supporters however that rarely coincides with reality. Let's just stick to the cold hard facts. The claim is the following: "Geocaching has reached its peak and is declining." First of all we have to establish a measurement which acts as our key performance indicator (KPI). In order to do so, we have to have a look at the typical or key activity of this hobby: A cache gets found by a player. Yes technically people don't find caches as well however nobody logs DNFs which means we can disregard this. Anyway this results in three things we can measure: Caches Finds Players Since we want to analyse a trend we obviously have to look at the numbers developing over time and check if there is actually a trend. Caches Every week somebody ventures out and places a new cache in a more or less suitable l...

You need some inspiration for the next hike?  Darren and Julie Edwards have created a rather fancy website which should give you plenty of options: