A local cacher recently disabled all of his geocaches because it’s winter causing a number of geocachers questioning why the owner did this, particularly as some of the caches are not prone to being buried in the snow. Someone who asked the cache owner about it reported back that they prefer to disable their caches in the winter and  commented that they have also received some not-so-diplomatic emails from cachers not happy about their disabling of their geocaches. (Seriously? What’s with that?)

Naturally, this has made me think about the caches I own. Most of my caches are not winter-friendly, so I disable them once the snow falls and wait until spring arrives to re-enable them. I do this because the containers are plastic Lock-n-Locks, which tend to become brittle in the extreme cold common to Canadian winters. As well, the trails left by people walking up to the caches might attract other people to dig around, possibly damaging the container.

Most cachers probably respect a cache owner’s disabling of a cache and seek out other caches that aren’t disabled, but there are some cachers who are not deterred by a cache being disabled by its owner. Personally, I do not look for caches that are flagged as being disabled because that’s a conscious decision on the part of an owner. It doesn’t matter why the cache has been disabled – if it’s disabled, I leave it alone.

So this begs the question: Should people who actively seek out a disabled cache be allowed to log it?

I don’t think they should because they’re not respecting the rules (or at least the spirit) of the game.

Cache owners can delete logs posted for their caches, but I couldn’t find anything that talked one way or the other about deleting logs for disabled.

What do you think? Should people be allowed to keep finds they log for caches that have been disabled by the owner?