Cachers of the Rose

If you're hunting in parks or natural areas try carrying a baseball mitt. People will assume you are searching for your baseball. I personally use a camera and poke around the area taking close up shots of stuff. I agree it's best to be bold and obvious, stealth looks creepy. The other best advise is to skip it and come back on a week day or less busy time. But sometimes less people is worse... like the time I left the park walking path with my 20 year old son and entered the scrubby bush and tree area... a police officer was waiting when we came out. It's nice to be carrying a cache printout for times like this!

When I first started I expected the GPS to point to the cache too. I've learned these techniques by trial and error. When I reach the GPS's location, I visually plot a circle of maybe 10-20 feet and search that area and increase it as needed. If that fails I walk off the opposite direction 50-100 feet and approach again with the GPS to see where the GPS leads me, sometimes I repeat this from a third different direction an triangulate the results. Trial and error also taught me it's easiest to find the cache when you are "not looking for it." I scan the area as a whole (sort of look through it not at it) and let my eyes catch anything out of place. Nature does not have straight lines or right angles, plastic, metal, certain colors etc. So when I look at the natural environment as a whole, these anomalies seem to jump out and are quite often the cache. My technique reminds me of those optical illusions where you have to relax your eyes and look through the random designed background and suddenly a 3-D scene pops out. Good luck! Practice does make perfect! FYI: I have a simple cheap GPS, my daughter's boyfriend has an elaborate expensive unit. They can rarely find caches unless they are with me. My daughter told him size does not mater!

I've searched and hunted and I can't figure out how to add a picture to a cache's gallery. I'm probably missing the obvious but it would not be the first time

This is my funny find story. I hunted a small cache in Catigny Park, WHeaton, IL it's a war memorial, botanical garden, has a mansion, and trails etc. and a very public place. I kept loosing the satelite signal but I managed to narrow it down to a 40 feet area maybe. Couldn't find anything. I noticed another geocacher (holding his GPS out obviously)and invited him to join the hunt. He couldn't find it either. There was a shallow cement pond with small statuary in the area with a very dense wiast high hedge around it. Desparate, I laid down in the wood chips along the hedge to look under them. I found the cache under the hedge on the second side I checked. I called to the other cacher, and opened it still laying on the ground. He squatted down nearby to sign the log. We took a picture of ourself with the disposable camera then we repacked and slid it back under the hedge. When we stood up a whole bridal party was posed maybe 15 feet away across the pond. I don't know what they thought to see a 50 year-old woman pop up behind a hedge with another, somewhat younger, man. Caught! Honestly there was no one around when I laid down and I wasn't down that long! Shocked, I looked to the other cacher who muttered something like, "so much for steath." I looked back at the bride and said. "beautful dress" and got out of there. It was three firsts. the first time I ever cached alone, the first time I caught another cacher in the hunt, and the first time I was caught by muggles. But I was caught with style!