As with the point leader boards, we will have a set of back country leader boards for each defined region. Currently we have six regions defined: LonelyCache wide, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
Each region will have the following set of back country leader boards:
- Best all Around Geocacher (BAG?).
- Traditional Cache.
- Multi-Cache.
- Virtual Cache.
- Letterbox Hybrid.
- Unknown Cache.
- Webcam Cache: Note that this board is defined but no current region has enough qualifying webcam caches to support it.
- EarthCache.
- Wherigo Cache.
A geocacher's back country score is calculated by averaging the score of the top 20 qualifying caches that geocacher has hid and/or found in the region. If the geocacher has not found or hid 20 qualifying caches, then the scores of the qualifying caches he/she has found or hid are summed and the sum is divided by 20. A consequence of this is that the minimum back country score is 5/20 or 0.25, however only backcountry scores of 1 or greater are saved. As previously mentioned qualifying caches must have a minimum score of 5. They must also be of the appropriate cache type for the particular board. I'd like to reiterate here, that a geocacher's hide will only be counted if it has been found.
When we introduce smaller regions based on polygons, such as for counties or DGP type regions, then those regions will only need to contain 10 qualifying caches instead of 20 and we will take the average of the top 10 instead of the top 20. This is similar to what the DGP did in that the DGP Region back country ranking was based on the top ten caches, whereas overall and states were based on the top 20.
Some more information about the back country leader boards:
- Leader boards will be made up of the back country scores of all geocacher's that have a back country score of at least 1 for that board.
- Geocachers will be ranked by score. Top scorers will be the board leaders. In case of a tie, geocachers will have the same rank, but will be ordered by geocaching name.