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+1 vote
1.2k views
in Support and help by Beetstar (150 points)

3 Answers

+5 votes
Alas there is no way to get a list of oldest caches by country. Map-Hidden month will not help eaither, as this looks at filling your hidden month grid, and will never suggest a cache you have already found (which might already be the oldest).

Use Tools > Map based > Map NESW/Oldest to find the oldest cache in a selected country. At the bottom of the map is a list of 5 caches with their hide dates, making it easy to find which is the oldest cache. You can also use this to find the oldest cache, or the oldest active cache, by as you can add or exclude archived caches.
by the Seagnoid (Expert) (46.3k points)
Your answer is for countRy, as in nation (USA, Germany).  Their question is by county, as in a subdivision below a state/province (USA > California > Orange County, or Germany > Hessen > Main-Taunus-Kreis).

If your advice also applies to counties, awesome, but that R makes a difference.
NESW/Oldest works down to county level. But You do need to be a paid member of PGC to use it.
+2 votes

You should try the "Map compare" tool! - You do not have to compare your stats with the ones of another cacher and I think it can give you the list you wanted.

Select the country or county of which you want to create the list. If you only want a list of the oldest caches that you have not found, just tick the "none found" box. If you want a complete list with all the oldest available (disabled caches are not shown) caches tick the boxes "none found" and "one found".

If that is not enough for you, you  can also add the filter "show disabled /archived".

As a result you will be given a map with all the selected caches and a list with the caches that is sorted from the oldest one at the top and the youngest at the bottom.

Be aware that the max number of result is 10.000 caches. So if the selected country/ county is big and has a lot of caches the list could have some caches missing. Just add the filter for the hidden date if that happens.

by Kim_123 (190 points)
+2 votes
To expand a bit on Kim_123’s answer, because I have the feeling that the second aspect of your question is not yet covered, namely whether you have to start a search for every county.

You can use "Map compare" to (more or less) solve this problem. If you want to see the oldest caches for all counties in e.g. Belgium, select Belgium as country but nothing in the fields for state or county. Select, as appropriate, the options "none found"/"one found" and "show disabled/archived".

What you get is a list of all caches, sorted for the counties. (In Belgium PGC uses the municipalities as "counties", so we have a lot.) You see this in the list under "Location". It starts for each "county" with the lowest GC-code, which is likely to be the oldest cache in that municipality. (If in doubt, you'd have to look at the cache pages, though, to see when it was actually hidden/published.)

One caveat: because of the limit of 10.000 caches, which also Kim_123 mentioned, in bigger countries you would have to select a "hidden to ..." filter. Of course, if the oldest cache in a county is rather young (i. e. younger than the filter) the entire "county" will not show in the list. So, it’s not a 100% solution but maybe it helps.

As an example the link for Belgium (with a filter up to end of 2008): https://project-gc.com/Tools/MapCompare?profile_name=Beetstar&country=Belgium&nonefound=on&onefound=on&hidden_toyyyy=2008&hidden_tomm=12&hidden_todd=31&submit=Filter
by k+gw+a (12.6k points)
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