Power Trails

It took a long time for power trails to take off in South Africa. Team "MadSons" brought the first power trail to fruition by rallying the Pretoria and Johannesburg geocachers together to form a 170 km trail around the Gauteng area.

Power trails were born out of two factors. The first factor is that two geocaches may not (normally) be placed within 0.1 mile, or 161 meters, from each other. The second factor is that there are teams who want to know how many caches they can do within a 24 hour day.

So to complete the GPS (Gauteng Power Series) trail one should start at midnight, cache like crazy for 24 hours and then finish again at midnight. To find all 680 odd geocaches, a cache must be found around every 2 to 3 minutes, depending on what your target is.

There are teams that are against power trails, as they see it as taking away the *family* element from geocaching, and making it more about the numbers. It is one thing to get 1000 finds with 600 odd GPS geocaches. It is another thing to find 1000 geocaches without the GPS series.

To try and complete all 686 GPS trail geocaches within 24 hours one can use the following formula:
24 Hours × 60 minutes per hour = 1440 minutes.
1440 minutes divided by 686 geocaches = 2.01 minutes per geocache.

To achieve the top GSAK badge for "caches in a single day" one only needs to find 400 geocaches.
Working on around a 10% DNF ratio one should plan to look for around 450 geocaches. This means that
450 geocaches in 1440 minutes (24 Hours) means a cache must be found every 3 minutes.

A map of the GPS trail in Gauteng

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