On May 1, 2015, the Official Geocaching Blog announced the “Summer (August) Souvenir Challenge” as “Geocaching Road Trip ’15.” It was intended to help celebrate 15 years of geocaching using a road trip theme. It provided geocachers with the opportunity to complete five geocaching quests, each of which provided a special profile souvenir, with a bonus sixth extra special one for those cachers who completed all five quests.
The
geocaching community had from June 19 – September 2 to complete the challenges,
with the release of each posted on the Official Geocaching Blog:
- Week
1 (June 19 – Sept 2): Find a geocache with 10 or more Favorite Points
- Week
2 (July 3 – Sept 2): Attend an Event, Mega-Event or Giga-Event
- Week
3 (July 17 – Sept 2): Find a T5 or D5 geocache
- Week
4 (July 31 – Sept 2): Find an EarthCache or attend a CITO
- Week
5 (August 14 – Sept 2): Find a Mystery Cache
Geocaching HQ also continued to lean into the booming social media culture of the mid-2010’s. They turned the challenge into a viral community movement, urging players to send digital e-invites to recruit friends to Geocaching.com, as well as having cachers across the globe document their journeys under the unified #Geocaching15 hashtag, capturing a snapshot of the game at its 15-year mark. To tie it all together, HQ introduced the exclusive “Geocaching Co-Pilot” mailing list—a clever incentive that rewarded signed-up members with a weekly newsletter featuring the community's best tagged photos.
Week 1 - Fun with Favorites
Week 4 – High-Five for the Earth
Week 5 – Put on Your Thinking Cap
Physical Souvenirs
For those cachers who appreciate and collect physical souvenirs from these challenges, there were plenty of items available - from patches, to geocoins, trackable keychains, and t-shirts.
Featured Routes and Highlights
Some of the featured routes and highlights included:
- Route
66: Featured
iconic American roadside stops and caches along the historic U.S. route.
- Germany
Bike Tour:
Highlighted a 1,600 km bicycle journey crossing seven federal states from
north to south.
- New
Zealand Series:
Showcased Lord of the Rings-inspired locations and "greatest
hits" caches.
- Alps
Hiking Team:
Followed a team crossing the Alps on foot over nearly 100 miles and 33,000
feet of elevation.
Data shows that over 52,000 geocachers worldwide participated in the challenge, earning their profile souvenirs for finishing five specific quests, plus the sixth bonus souvenir for completing all of them. Overall, I would consider this year's summer souvenir challenge a success!