In my experience archived caches fall into 3 categories:
- Where a cache owner has decided that he wishes to archive a cache and goes and collects it – therefore can’t be found again
- Where a cache owner loses interest and just archives it – it may be there, but probably has already gone missing or is in a bad state of maintenance – possible to find again
- Where a reviewer notices that a cache has not been maintained or when somebody else has logged a “needs archive” he will normally give 14 days notice and then archive it. It appears to be this sort that can often be found, because the reviewer is not going to go and retrieve it!
I have found several archived caches in the last 12 months or so. One of the Granite Trail caches had been archived, replaced by another CO and I found both caches within 30 or 40m and logged them both. The first one should never have been archived, but once again a reviewer archived it because he had no reply from the CO, but the cache was still there!
I suspect that there may be several other archived caches out there as I know at least one cache owner who suddenly archived several active caches and I always wondered if he bothered to retrieve them!
I am currently maintaining one very old archived cache and hope one day to get it unarchived, but that is not easy. If I do, it will probably be Dartmoor’s oldest cache, but of course in name only as neither the log book or cache are original.
