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We're starting to work on placing our first caches but are getting paranoid about property rights & boundaries. I know we need permission to place a cache on private property, but isn't every piece of land owned by somebody?!?! How do you find public property, other than parks (which are just about at cache capacity by now)? How can we find out where we're able to place a cache?

Well so far i have had luck with just not placing caches in people's yards. County, city, state, government property is considered public for geocaching. hoppe this helps!

Private property requires permission. Quite a bit of public property now requires permission, some in conjunction with their own guidelines for placing a cache. Some public property will not allow cache placement at all.
With the increasing growth rate of geocaching and cache placement, my opinion would be to seek permission regardless. This will help raise the awareness level of those who own or maintain property and enlighten them as to why people are in the area, reducing suspicion of “strange� activity.

I believe the increasing amount of lamp post caches (skirt lifters) will soon catch up with geocaching and have a negative impact to the hobby. I don’t consider signing a log in the parking lot of Target as being part of what the sport was intended to be…. My own two cents here….
Find a spot where you’d like to actually hunt a cache, and this will be a good spot to place one. Check forums on NWOGEO and the Geocaching.com home page for placement suggestions and further advice and you can’t go wrong.

If you do place a cache in an area that requires permission which you didn’t obtain, Keystone (approver) will keep you in check here… One may not always agree with him, but generally, it’s for the better of the sport.

BarnacleBear wrote:Can I have an AMEN!

!!! AMEN !!!

I might suggest reading these two forum topics. They are quite informative of what can go wrong with haphazard cache placement.

Bridgeport Ohio

Urbana, Ohio

Wal-Mart in PA

Also it would be good to review these

Geocaching Guidelines (NWOGeo)