There are two geocaching achievements that I feel many avid geocachers strive to complete - the Jasmer Challenge and the Fizzy Challenge.
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The Jasmer Challenge is a geocaching achievement that requires finding at least one geocache hidden in every calendar month since the game began in May 2000.
Core Requirements -
The Grid: To complete the challenge, the you must fill a "Jasmer Grid"—a table where rows are years and columns are months.
Continuous Pursuit: Because geocaching is ongoing, the challenge is "infinite." To maintain a completed status, you must find a new cache hidden in the current month every single month.
The Origin: The challenge is named after geocacher jasmerb, who created the first official Jasmer Challenge cache (GC1GBC1) in California in 2008.
Why It Is Difficult -
The challenge becomes progressively harder due to the rarity of early caches:
The "Oldies": Caches from the year 2000 are extremely rare. There are fewer than 120 caches from that entire year still active worldwide.
August 2000 Bottleneck: This is famously the hardest month to fill. Only four active caches from August 2000 remain in the world: three in the USA (Utah, Georgia, Michigan) and one in Sweden.
GC3B - Potter's Pond (Utah)
GC36 - Geocache 612 (Michagan)
GC21 - Lake Lanier (Georgia)
GC4D - Match Stash (Stockholm, Sweden)
My Jamser Challenge -
As I am one who likes to accept and complete a challenge, I also like to move on from it once completed. Therefore, I have decided that to complete the Jasmer Challenge, I will complete the grid as presented on the original Mystery Cache listing page, which covers June 2000 - December 2008.
In addition to completing the Jasmer Grid, I have also emplaced a final requirement of completing the challenge by finding The Jasmer Challenge geocache in Mountain View, CA (between San Francisco and San Jose).
My Current Challenge Status:
2001 - Jan, May
2002 -
2003 -
2004 - Feb
2005 -
2006 - Jan
2007 -
2008 -
The Fizzy Challenge, also known as the 81 Grid or Well-Rounded Cacher challenge, is another popular geocaching milestone that requires finding at least one geocache for every possible Difficulty and Terrain (D/T) combination, as well as finding at least one of each type of the following geocaches - EarthCache, Event Cache, Letterbox Hybrid, CITO Event, Multi Cache, Traditional Cache, Unknown Cache, Virtual Cache, and Webcam Cache (APE and MEGA caches were excluded because they are "few and far between" and Locationless Caches have been phased out).
Key Components -
The Grid: Every geocache is rated on a 1–5 scale for both Difficulty (how hard it is to find/solve) and Terrain (how physically challenging it is to reach). Using 0.5 increments, there are 81 total combinations (e.g., 1/1, 1.5/3, 5/5).
The Goal: To "fill the grid," a cacher must log a find for at least one cache in each of the 81 unique D/T slots.
The Origin: The challenge was named in honor of geocacher FizzyMagic, who created a statistics program that first generated the D/T matrix. The first actual challenge cache, Well Rounded Cacher (The Fizzy Challenge) (GC11E8N) was placed in California by the user Kealia.
Tracking Progress: Cachers typically track their grid progress using the official Statistics tab on Geocaching.com (for Premium members) or third-party tools like Project-GC, which provides automated "challenge checkers" to verify qualifications.
My Current Challenge Status:
1/4.5, 1/5
1.5/4
2/5
2.5/4, 2.5/4.5, 2.5/5
3/4.5, 3/5
3.5/4.5, 3.5/5
4/3, 4/3.5, 4/5
4.5/3.5, 4.5/4.5
5/1.5, 5/3, 5/3.5, 5/4