News & New Caches 173

We have 4 new events for your diaries:

GCB34NR 9 Usual Suspects – Nosh & Natter 75 by 9 Usual Suspects
When: Thursday 27th February, 2025
Where: Parc Snowdonia, Waunfawr, Caernarfon, Gwynedd LL55 4AQ
Time: 7pm to 9pm or when the last person leaves

GCB34PF CITO, A487 North, Another Quick Pick by 9 Usual Suspects CITO D1/T4.5
When: Wednesday 5th March 2025
Where: A487North Lay by
Time: 11am to 12pm

GCB34QK CITO 2025 Season 1 by 9 Usual Suspects CITO D1/T3
When: Saturday 8th March 2025
Where: The Old Bridge, Morfa Parc, Caernarfon
Time: 2pm – 3.30pm

GCB34RZ 9 Usual Suspects Cake and a Brew by 9 Usual Suspects Event D1/T1
When: Saturday 8th March 20254
Where: Old Bridge, Parc Dre, Caernarfon
Time: 3.30pm to 4pm

75th Nosh and Natter!

This months Nosh & Natter is our 75th! Our first N&N was on Monday 9th May, 2015, at the Antelope Inn, Bangor with 9 attendees. Who then would have dreamt that 10 years later we would still be meeting up once a month. Over the years we have had 66 different geocaching accounts log an attended from all corners of the world. We can’t find any photos of the first event but I have found one from our first Christmas Dinner:

CITO Season 1, 2025

CITO Season 1, 2025 souvenir will be available from Saturday 1st March through to Saturday 31st May, 2025. We have 2 CITO events published for the beginning of March that by attending will earn the souvenir. We are planning more CITO’s later in the season.

Treasure Collections Update

This new feature starts on Monday 17th March.
Collection 1: Geocaching origins
In this collection there are four Treasures inspired by the beginnings of geocaching. To find, simply find and log Traditional Caches.
We are still unsure if there will be a Treasure in every Traditional cache or only hidden in a selected few. Also will the Treasure be visible prior to finding the cache or only revealed on logging.

Collection 2: Celebrating 25 years
To unlock Collection 2, Collection 1 must be completed. This collection has five Treasures that can be found by logging any cache that has a difficulty rating of 1.5 or lower.

The Treasures feature will be available in the Geocaching® app and on Geocaching.com starting 17th March at 17:00 UTC. If you log caches using third-party or Geocaching API partner applications, you will still collect Treasure but it will not be visible in the app. and you will not receive in-app notifications when a Treasure is found. Progress can be viewed on the Geocaching® app and on Geocaching.com.

Event Review

GCB22FR 9US & Severn UK Mega Team present Ski Saturday by 9 Usual Suspects D1/T2

Firstly I must say very big Thank You to mutchie from the Severn UK Mega Team for visiting us, answering all our questions and concerns regarding this years Mega. Our Wii skiing event has become an annual fixture in the 9US calendar. This years event was the downhill, which I thought was one of the easier disciplines but the course proved to be a lot trickier than I remembered. As always the activity on the slopes was very competitive giving rise to lots of banter and laughter. Big thanks to Pete for being time keeper, making sure the technology behaved itself, printing the souvenirs and medals.

Highlights of our day:

News & New Caches 170

It’s a very quiet time for geocaching here in North Wales, no new caches or events to report since our last post.

HQ Announce ‘Treasures’ a New Feature

Starting in March 2025, ‘Treasures’ will be a new collectible game feature. The digital treasures will be like previous challenges, Mystery at the Museum and the magic items in Signal’s Labyrinth. Unlike those challenges when digital treasures were temporary and disappeared when the promotion ended, these ‘Treasures’ will be a permanent feature. Geocachers can collect these digital items by finding and logging caches that meet specific criteria set by HQ to form a ‘Treasure Collection’. The amount of treasures needed to complete a collection will vary. The treasures will placed in caches with certain D/T ratings or cache types or a combination of both making some collections easy to complete while others will be very difficult.

Not all completed Treasure collections will receive a souvenir.

As the release date approaches HQ will be announcing more details.

2024 Statstics

At the beginning of every year Geocaching HQ release stats on the previous years geocaching. As Geocaching is a global game I’m always surprised to see how few active participants there are, with a world population of just over 8 billion, only 1,846,540 geocachers found at least one cache and less than 60,000 geocachers hid a cache in 2024! Are Adventure Labs taking over?

Maybe we ought to do 9US stats….