I enjoy hunting for NGS Benchmarks. The hobby started with geocaching, because geocaching.com used to include a database of benchmarks along with an easy way to log benchmark “finds”. Around 2022, though, the powers that be at geocaching.com decided to drop support for finding and logging benchmarks. They way they handled it left a lot to be desired (a topic for a different post), but as a business decision, cutting benchmarking loose made sense: the code base that supported benchmarking was undoubtedly aging and difficult to support; the benchmark database (a one-time snapshot of NGS data taken circa 2001) was out of date and impossible to properly update; and the number of people who logged benchmarks was very small relative to the entire population of geocachers. I was part of that minority, though, and I stopped logging benchmarks for about 2.5 years, but now I’m looking to take it back up.
All in all, I logged 134 benchmarks on geocaching.com. Before they pulled the plug and deleted all my logs, I was able to save them by writing a (really ugly) script to scrape them from geocaching.com, and I now have an offline copy of all of my benchmark logs, including photos. My goal is eventually to post these on lpaulriddle.com, but they need a little bit more clean-up first. I also have all of my recoveries saved in GSAK (a Windows-based geocaching database), but as GSAK is end-of-life and no longer maintained, I don’t look at it as a long-term solution for tracking recoveries. Instead, going forward, I’m thinking about posting my benchmark recovery logs here. My plan is to create a “benchmarks” WordPress category, and create a blog post for each recovery. For the post title, I’ll likely use a combination of the benchmark PID and name. In the post itself, I’ll include the usual photos I take of the mark and its surroundings, along with a link to the NGS datasheet, and my log detailing the find.
There’s also the question of how to find nearby benchmarks, now that they’re no longer listed on geocaching.com. Each cache page used to include a link to search for benchmarks near the cache. It was a little bit klunky, as there was no benchmark map, but it worked. I can also go to the NGS site, search for marks by county or latitude/longitude, download all the datasheets as a text file, convert it to GPX format with a tool called NGS_GPX, and then load the GPX into Cachly or my Garmin GPS to view the benchmarks on the map. This method is still possible, but kind of a pain, and hard to do without advance planning. My recent searches have turned up 2 websites that show benchmarks on a map:
Both of these sites include benchmark coordinates and quick links to NGS datasheets for each mark. It remains to be seen whether either site is mobile-friendly. In the field, it would be very handy to see the map on my phone along with my current location. At the very least, I’ll need a way to easily pull the benchmark data into an app like Cachly so that I can navigate to the marks, e.g. by copying and pasting the coordinates. I will see how it goes and report back.
