El Rojo's Wrath Duck

This trackable is tasked to be a TB that the owner will likely never release and just sit in his inventory for eternity. 

In June 2016 Groundspeak started an ingenious marketing scheme to move what had to be thousands of unsold trackables and a new slew of adorable collectible ducks at excellent profit margins. The HQ Duck Dash was born. Now anyone can purchase unused travel bugs or new highly profitable travel ducks to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Jeremy Irish's typically unsuccessful launch of Deadly Duck: Envy - TB1 (the trackable was placed in a cache and just seems to have disappeared, just like most trackables out there). 

Groundspeak has even pulled out an even more enticing incentive for you to spend more money on useless trinkets by offering an "HQ Duck Dash badge to add to their profile". Is it a souvenir? Is it a badge? What is it? We don't know! But just like the souvenirs, we will do whatever it takes to try and earn one so we can say we have 100 souvenirs and tell your friends that generally are apathetic to any of your cache statistics.  

There is just one catch. In order to earn this badge, that will no doubt be forgotten in less than a week, your trackable has to be dropped into an International Geocaching Day Event on August 20, 2016. Given that you already know any trackable you drop into the wild is going to go missing within a week or some noob cacher using the intro app has no idea what it is and will soon give it to their three year old to hold onto for years, you are likely going to buy multiple new Deadly Ducks and travel bugs just so you have one to keep and personally take to an event on August 20th. 

And did we mention there are different prize categories? You can also win a prize by having the best photo or the best log. No doubt these are even more sinister ways to get you to submit more promotional material to Groundspeak so they can continue to market these silly things to you. Pure capitalistic genius! 

And then there are the more traditional awards like furthest distance traveled, most geocaches involved, and most Geocachers involved. Of course being the chief nerd among your friends is fairly important so no one would ever dream of cheating on this contest so their name can forever be immortalized in Geocaching lore by being able to link back to the page that shows you were in a first through third place on one of these mentions.

Best of all, this whole exciting contest lasts only one month in order to reduce the extra workload heaped upon Groundspeak staff from all of the people reporting their fellow cheaters. Since we know dealing with challenge cache appeals is a fate worse than 10 years in a prisoner of war camp, only a month of answering e-mails reporting cheaters in this contest can be tolerated by the HQ staff. 

So get excited about this race! I definitely drank the Kool-Aid and not only bought a whole series of 7 Deadly Ducks Set, but a bunch of cheap rubber duck key chains on Amazon. I plan on flooding my entire area with ducks by July 20th! So join us in all of the fun!

Morris Family Duck Race

The Morris Family (elrojo14, kellann, EliEIO, & LilyLou13) are seeing which of their HQ Duck Dash entries go the farthest, have the most cachers, or have the most caches visited during the month long HQ Duck Dash. You can see their progress below.

Seven Deadly Duck Entries

Themed Duck Entries

Yellow Duck Entries

You can also track their progress from the Kern County Cacher's HQ Duck Dash Race Page.