How To Find the Oldest Active Caches in an Area

Beginner, Blog, How to 0

One of our listeners recently sent in an email discussing how he used a series of pocket queries to find the oldest active caches (by cache type) in his country. There are a number of ways to do this, and one of the easiest is to use the geocaching.com search page.

Team PodCacher at MINGO, the oldest active geocache

You do need to be a premium member to do this, otherwise you will see the results of a regional search, but won't be able to sort by "placed on" date to find the oldest ones. In addition, if a non-premium member does a city or zip-code type search (not a regional search), they will encounter the 30 mile restriction on search results. You just need to go ahead and become a premium member to enjoy all the essential features!

Here are the simple steps to find the oldest active caches in an area:

Start on the geocaching.com search page. If you're not there, select PLAY and then FIND A GEOCACHE.

Type in the name of an area, like a state, province or country. Examples would be "California", "Alberta", "Germany", "Victoria". Make sure it says “Regional Search” – not a search with a default 10 mile radius.

After the results are displayed, click on the header “Placed On” to sort by hidden date. It defaults to showing newest first, so click on it again and you’ll see the oldest active caches in the defined area.

Now, if you are interested in finding the oldest of each TYPE of geocache, you can do a bunch of scrolling down the screen looking for the first of each icon you see. A better way is to use a series of filters to narrow your search.

For example, if you wanted to find the oldest active virtual cache in your defined area, click on ADD FILTERS, then "Deselect all" the Geocache Types, and select only Virtual. Then click SEARCH to run the search again. If you haven't changed the sorting, the results will still be sorted by oldest first.

One final tip. If you don't want to do a large regional search, but instead a search around a city, zip-code, or GC code, the search will initially default to a 10 mile radius. Simply click on ADD FILTERS and adjust the radius to your desired search area. Then follow the same steps listed above.

Have fun searching out those old geocaches and going to find them!