by Wes Skinner (NorthWes)
Please take time to read the update article on compliance with the 2026 Alaska State Park permit terms. More than 400 geocaches are facing archival over the course of the next three months if they’re not brought into compliance with permit terms!
If you’re interested in helping geocache owners get their caches into compliance, note that the Alaska State Park staff are allowing us to do ‘proxy’ owner maintenance visits on behalf of the actual cache owner. This means you can file a ‘proxy’ owner maintenance log when you visit
the cache (and sign the cache log correctly), as well as by filing the same log online (but only if you have permission from the cache owner!).
There is a requested format for how cache owner maintenance logs are to be written, which is detailed in the accompanying article.
Please update any owner maintenance logs you’ve filed online to meet the format as requested by Alaska State Parks. I know I’m sounding somewhat like a broken record as I continue to draw your attention to efforts being made to meet the terms of the 2026 permit. I will point out that for more than 15 years the Alaska State Park permits have required annual owner maintenance visits to be logged both in person at the cache and online on the cache page, so this is nothing new.
However, a review of how often that’s been done in the past shows an embarrassingly high lack of compliance on the part of geocache owners, which was noted by Alaska State Park enforcement staff (rangers and maintenance personnel) during their field visits to inspect existing geocache placements. We’re being called to compliance – which means actually doing what we said we’d do when we first put our geocaches out on state park lands.
GeocacheAlaska Inc. staffers have put in tremendous amounts of time in doing the review work and outreach necessary to help us get our geocachers to bring their cache placements into compliance with permit terms. As part of the necessary effort this review process requires,
a volunteer Auditor position serving as part of the Advocacy Committee was created. This Permit Compliance Auditor runs weekly updates of geocache compliance (using GSAK – the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife online application) to review cache placements for owner maintenance logs and for size compliance where necessary (meaning micro-sized within Chugach State Park only).
Our staff has reached out to Groundspeak Headquarters to review this process, and is gratified to find them in support of our efforts to maintain our opportunities to play the get-outdoors game of geocaching across Alaska’s state parks. As a fundamental part of the review process when geocaches are submitted to the local volunteer reviewer, Groundspeak requires that the geocache owner has complied with landowner / land manager conditions regarding the geocache placement. I’m calling on all of us to be found faithful in meeting this requirement to meet the permit terms with the geocaches we have placed across Alaska’s beautiful state park lands.