A County Challenge is a type of Challenge Cache.
Description[]
A county challenge requires a geocacher to find one geocache for each county of a particular state. This is often considered a harder challenge due to the amount of work involved, but is also seen as a badge of honor by some cachers.
Rules[]
County challenges are typically set up by someone living within the state the challenge is aimed at. In a few states, due to the number of counties, challenge owners may have setup up their challenge for specific set of counties. Common rules can be found from state to state, including:
- One cache per county is required
- Caches must be physical caches; no events/virtuals/earthcaches (exceptions do exist)
- Cachers may place caches to claim a county, but no more than XX number of counties can be claimed through cache placement (this rule is more common in older county challenges due to the lower number of available caches at that time).
- Inclusion/exclusion of caches placed prior to the publication date of the challenge (often referred to as Retroactive vs Fresh Start)
Purpose[]
Most county challenges are set up to meet one of two presumed goals:
- To help geocachers explore a state
- To give geocachers a challenging goal to meet
Tracking[]
A variety of resources can be used by geocachers to keep track of which counties they have cached in. Some will use plain old paper and pencil using a printed out map of counties for each state. Digital resources are also available:
- GSAK can output maps of finished counties using user created macros.
- My Geocaching Profile can produce maps of finished counties.
- Project-GC will track the counties you have completed and put them on a map
- County Counting sites like Why do you think they call them counties? allow users to create maps.
Sample progress map[]
Examples[]
A few examples of different county challenge cache pages:
- Texas County Challenge (the first state county challenge)
- Nebraska 93 County Challenge
- Washington State County Challenge
- Colorado County Challenge