"lost" extreme Top Elevation

Question

My understanding of how the extremes on Project-GC work was that tonce you have claimed it, it remains permanently, regardless of whether any cache later surpasses "your find" in it's particular category.

In my home district, there is a cache at an elevation of 709 metres that has been there since 2008. I found it on 29 May 2026, and it was recorded as the highest cache in the district at that time. On 23 August 2026, a new cache was published at an elevation of 716 metres. The new "Top Elevation". BUT/AND the Top Elevation extreme for my district is now missing from my statistics.

I have a feeling that something like this has already happened to me at least once before, but in this case I am absolutely certain. I can verify exactly which cache it was, what its elevation was, that its elevation has not been changed, when I logged it, and which cache has now replaced it as the highest one.

Is this a bug, or are extremes actually supposed to be overwritten and disappear like this? If that is how it works ... why would I deliberately make a detour to find an extreme in a foreign country, only to lose it later simply because someone publishes a new cache that surpasses it?

I would appreciate clarification on how this is supposed to work.

update: wilson score is so dynamic thing that it's loosing any meaning whatsoever this way (?)

Answer 1

It's not a bug. That's how the extremes work. If you find a geocache which is an extreme but then it is surpassed by a different cache, then that different cache becomes a new extreme while the former loses its extreme status and you no longer have an extreme found.

It is especially common for extremes based on dynamic cache properties, such as finds amount, FP amount or the Wilson score you have mentioned.

Comments

I used to like them (until yesterday); I thought they (extremes by project-gc) were an interesting concept. But if they really work this way, then I don’t see much point in them anymore. It’s basically "chasing the wind".

I’d say that if that’s the case, then they’re really just a list of recommended caches. But then you have to ask yourself: why to recommend an ordinary, not-popular cache somewhere on the edge of a county in the middle of nowhere when it can simply be replaced by another one a month later?

At that point, it doesn’t really make sense as something that is supposed to be represented by graphs and statistics. In this format, it feels rather pointless to me.