Snoogans

Why so high in Texas? Any thoughts on that? I presume this is not one of the regions of Texas that has been hit by the drought? Dallas is in the drought area and it is the hardest hit with 9 deaths. Houston is not in the drought area, is infested with mosquitos, and only has one death. There is a school of thought that a great deal of the folks in Houston harbor an immunity due to frequent exposure to WNV bearing mossies. I can't find anything official on that even though it sounds plausable. I was thinking along those lines when I discovered that others were thinking the same. It stands to reason that the 4th largest city in the U.S. should have more cases based on the CDC's 15%-20% statistic with 1 in 150 being serious to fatal. But we don't... It would be interesting to test the local cachers to see who has WNV antibodies in their system. I'm seriously considering asking my company doctor to take a sample from me and have it tested. I'm a mosquito magnet. BTW we did have one cacher contract WNV but it was awhile back from what I was told.

Another WNV death in Texas last night which brings the total to 17 for the entire state.

LOL! I was just about to start a thread titled What do the F-Bomb and Geocaching have in common???... http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/48652479/ns/today-books/#.UCl1R51mTsY

The West Nile Virus has reached epidemic stage in Dallas county where there have already been 9 WNV related deaths and hundreds of confirmed cases. Meanwhile a few hours south, in Houston, where I live, Dr. Rudy Bueno, Harris County Mosquito Control Director, stated that 90% of the mosquitos tested in the Houston area are testing positive for the virus. FREAKIN' 90%!!! In doing the research to send a mass email out to the employees of my company and our tenants, I discovered that it's not just Texas that needs to take precautions.... Here is the Centers of Disease Control WNV resource. Please take a moment to learn more. Don't stop cachin', but be extra careful especially in the early morning and evenings when the nasty little critters are most active. Oh, I meant this as a joke back in 2003, but it sadly has been proven to be true... geocaching:(v) Wayyy more chances to contract West Nile or Lyme Disease than the average person... Anyone know of any cachers that have contracted WNV??? Be careful out there and don't forget the mosquito repellant.

I believe that's OCUS not OX. Points off for garmin creating that confusion too.

*yawn* Wake me when these "finds" start to affect my stats.

2004 GCM7GP Safe from the City (An annual New Years Eve campout) 2011 GC388TC SFTC VIII It's really cool to spend New Years Eve out camping and a heckuva lot safer than dodging all the drunks and random gunfire in the city.

2004 GCM7GB White Elephant Gift Exchange #1 2011 GC39KFF W.E.G.E. #8 (Hosted by GsGuru) This event is a spinoff from the W.E.G.E. game I ran at UsMorrows' christmas event (GCH862) in 2003. Technically the game will be in its tenth year when I host W.E.G.E. #9 this December. BTW it's a really fun game and you're welcome to copy my text and host your own W.E.G.E. It's not my original idea. I just wrote it down...

That was the first event I ever attended.

Until geomate.jr was sold my little 'mate was every bit as good as my Garmin 60CSX, but it wasn't good for hiding caches. Every Magellan I've owned makes you hook back to a cache. I never used it if I was cachin' with someone who had a Garmin. There has to be a brand out there that is just as good if geomate is just as accurate. As I recall, the Geomate Jr. had the same (awesome) SiRF chipset as the Garmin 60CSx that so many of us love dearly. I wouldn't doubt it. It was awesome to be able to step off a plane and just go cache without having to do a bunch of advance planning. Too bad it's worthless now.

To be honest GS probably has more like 98.5% of the market. And I do support alternative listing. It would be nice if Garmin encouraged users to create and maintain a unique database like other alternative cache listing services have done... TC has fostered a culture to hide unique listings since 2004. If OX did that from the beginning, I would hide OX caches. I would love to get rumor control from GS about the unsubstantiated rumor that Garmin wanted to acquire Groundspeak, was turned down, and launched OX in retaliation. OX's tactics sure lend some validity to that rumor. OX isn't worth your time. There's TC, OCUS, Navicache, and the letterboxing sites Atlas Quest & LBNA. It's all hide and seek to me, but this site still gives the most bang for the buck.

Until geomate.jr was sold my little 'mate was every bit as good as my Garmin 60CSX, but it wasn't good for hiding caches. Every Magellan I've owned makes you hook back to a cache. I never used it if I was cachin' with someone who had a Garmin. There has to be a brand out there that is just as good if geomate is just as accurate.

Geocaching.com doesn't need me or anyone else as a champion, but the longer Garmin continues to encourage and bribe users to crosslist their caches onto their website the less I like their brand regardless of how well it performs. I just posted this: I noticed on the Geocachers Unlimited fb page, folks like me who support alternative cache listing services also feel the same as I do about Garmin's opencaching website.... So make yourself heard.... Ummm if you want to. Maybe the suits at Garmin will take notice if enough of us complain.

I just about choked on my fiber one brownie when I read the title of this thread. Thank goodness it had nothing to do with bad apples in Texas. It's an inside joke that I will only talk about offline, (plausable deniability) but there are probably a few other Texas and possibly Tennessee cachers that will read this and get my meaning.

Time to trot this old horse out again since the "game" has changed a lot in the last 5 years..... My game has changed a little too: Now that I sometimes hide and find caches with my 4.5yo Snooglet, I find that sometimes the most mundane hides and locations can be great fun or a real challenge seen through his eyes. Make that 209 events in 10 states. I drove 8,666 mile roundtrip to attend GW8. That's my longest cachin run to date. I got almost 200 caches and attended 10 events. When I wrote the OP gas was a great deal cheaper. I don't go a long way outta my way to attend local (Texas & Houston) events anymore unless it's convenient or something really special. Cachin' event groups have become localized and in some areas a bit Balkinized and I think that is greatly due to gas prices. Okay, I finally went and found those. One of them is so good that it got a favorite point from me. Funny thing though. A friend and fellow geocacher actually hid a cache on our property (at work) and I did not become aware of it until 7 months later when one of my officers called the cops after seeing a guy stash something under a light pole base cover. It turned into one of the most interesting finds I ever had. Of course the cache is archived now. Still true, but I'll take any convenient cache just to get a fix sometimes. I'm not too picky at those times. Still do, but ya gotta use an alternate listing service to hide and find LCs and to hide Virts. Funny how virts were so derided back in the day, but most new cachers go outta their way to get them and many wish we could still list them. Well?

Does Mingo deserve a special icon or souvinir? Yes and no. I don't believe Groundspeak needs to bestow anything on Mingo for outlasting all other caches at this time... Maybe when it's 25, 50, or 100 years old, but not now. For YEARS I have been an advocate of user funded personal cache icons. Your trackables page is lousy with 'em. I remember when there were only a few trackable icons and the Moun10bike coin icon was by farrr the hardest of all to get. I love collecting icons and I drove almost 100 miles ONE WAY just to discover and get that icon. When you look on my profile, the ONLY cache icon I am missing is the Block Party and don't think for a second that I didn't try to find a way to justify a trip to Seattle to get that. Rats, not this year. Groundspeak is losing money on a huge cash cow it doesn't seem to want to milk by opening up personal cache icons to users who want to pay for them. The other thing they are missing the boat on is that it would illustrate GeoTourism IN PICTURES (above and beyond souvinirs) to local & state governments that might wish to restrict geocaching in the future. The added side effect would be less whining about the APE, Groundspeak HQ, & Block Party icons because the cache icon page would be just as populated as the coin icon page in no time at all and there would be plenty of region specific caches to go around instead of mostly concentrating them in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. I would pony up for a couple of personal icons to highlight caches that are special to me and also to create a draw to my caches. Wouldn't you? Just sayin'.

I have a dayglo green vest and hat that I put on to do "cachin' stuff" where lots of people are present. I also have a clipboard that I will sometimes complete the outfit with. It doubles a safety gear on roadside caches. I can pretty much do what I want right out in the open. It's really uninteresting watching someone that you think is about to perform manual labor. Move with purpose and resist the urge to look around to see who is watching because that is a dead giveaway for suspicious activity.

Very well said. I think if I ever give prizes away again it will kid-centric. There is a regular local event that I refuse to host because of the expectation for prizes. I don't get it. Sure it's a nice gesture on the host's part, but totally not necessary. BTW I almost always win a prize and I swear it's using up my luck for winning the lotto. If you come to an event I host and you're the first one there, you'll get one of my FTF coins to keep or put in your next cache. I give anyone I meet for the first time my sig coin as well, but that's it for prizes at my events anymore. From experience, giving away more than half a dozen or so prizes is pushing geocacher attention spans to the limit at an event. I've seen a nasty argument break out over prizes in a GPS accuracy game (Ground Zero) where you put a flag in the ground at the coords provided. That's one fun game I'll never have at an event I host.

Tombstone is on the campus of the University of Texas at Arlington. It's a nice location, but its nothing to get in a dither about. Park up the street or you will have to feed a meter. Old caches are a curiosity and I get that, but I don't get all of the reverence. I did enjoy my time at Mingo, but my first time by it in 2005, I passed it up as uninteresting. It would have still been uninteresting if it hadn't been near sunset after a huge storm when I was there. I only stopped to see what the hubub was about. Standing at the location of the Original Stash was a special moment for me, but the UN-original stash was just another cache in the woods and undeserving of the favorite points it gets because of proximity to the original stash plaque. I've hidden caches that I know can last 100 years or more with very little maintenance, because they are in remote areas that will most probably never be developed. When the first cache to make it to 50 is crowned, I will show proper awe and reverence, but I'll also be in my 80's if I'm still alive.... And I'm pretty certain it won't be Mingo. But then I ramble on...

I've left a few bucks as an FTF prize for gas money a few times. I left several dollars in quarters in Necropolis so the next few finders who forgot to bring quarters could roll the special smashed coin inside the final. Over all it's a bad practice to leave any money in caches if it is legal tender in the country where the cache resides. Foreign money is cool and I really like finding it in caches. If it was perceived that all caches contained money, lots more caches would get "muggled." I usually trade for any money that is in a cache. I think the most I ever found was a 5 dollar bill and I put a full set of my coins in the cache as trade for it. Back when I started caching there was a real $100 bill that was a TB on a mission to repay some guy clear on the other side of the country. It went missing. Go figure. If someone finds a link to the $100 TB please post it. I can't find it.

PMO can't fix stupid. That said, all of my new caches are PMO because I like to be able to see the audit log.

TB1 Deadly Duck: Envy MrsB I had Deadly Duck: Lust for 5 years. I misplaced twice. I finally found it an placed it in Jeremy's hand at GW6 along with my Re-Tardis TB and told him to keep it for 5 years before releasing it. He let it off for good behavior after a 3 years.

It's not every day that a frequent forum poster finds one of my caches and favorites it. These logs from DragonsWest & Kablooey made my day yesterday. Thanks guys: Cache: A Claustrophobic's Nightmare/Just Say NO to Crack 7/21/12 kablooey: When Dragons West suggested this cache as a post-CITO adventure, I thought it sounded interesting. I didn't have any of these caches loaded into my GPSr, and I didn't have a phone signal; so I tabbed DW as the navigator. Bthomas suggested a vague navigation route; so I passed that on to DW, but apparently bthomas was talking on a different scale than we thought. Meanwhile, DW was so busy regaling us with his various stories, that we were well up 395 before he realized that we had passed the turn we were supposed to take. Then, we missed another turn and ended up going to the cemetery cache, which I had already visited, but the others hadn't. So, I let Xklondike take the lead, and he got us to the spot that looked like moguls to me, but there was no snow, and we needed to go up them. We both failed on our first attempts and decided that it was unlikely that both cars would get up there without tow ropes; so we transferred from car to foot. Once we reached the earthcache area, we decided that the littlest Xklondike team member wouldn't be managing the rest of the terrain. The second littlest member was going to go, but some of us decided to look for an easier entrance, while StackOverflow and Dragons West decided to take the shorter direction. We reached the cache area just before SO arrived to a blind drop. He was able to make it down, but DW had a boot failure and didn't follow. While Xklondike and SO continued to navigate through even more treacherous terrain, I followed Keb around, as he chased lizards around. A camera appeared from above at one point. DW eventually showed up. And finally, Keb or a lizard led me to a spot that sounded like a good match for the hints, and indeed there was the cache after all! We should have a lot of photos to upload. {5/5s,gr,h} 7/21/12 DragonsWest: Mercifully not hot today, well, not as hot as the next day would be. A real adventure and quite a bit of exploring to find the best way in, then a lot more searching for ways up, down and around, before the cache was discovered. In the process my right boot delaminated, so I had to tie it up with some climbing rope -- bit of a bummer, but we cachers are adaptable. Beautiful place to explore. Found with Xklondike clan, Stackoverflow and Kablooey. Thanks for the cache!

As a cache owner, I very much appreciated when a few folks went back and favorited a cache of mine that had been archived for several years. If it inspires a good hider to hide more good caches, how is that not helpful?