Maps-R-Us

Here is a map of the Booth fire from 8/21/2003 showing where it has burned down around Suttle and Blue Lakes. Not near the Eden cache yet! Without geography, we're nowhere!

Got a note from fractal about this topic so started to look into it. I haven't determined the location yet but do have a couple thoughts to share. First, there was a Federal Cave Resources Protection Act passed by Congress in 1988 which requires us (federal land managers) to protect (and therefore delete from maps) significant cave resources. Here is an explanatory link: FCRPA of 1988 I don't know if the Hellhole you are looking for about qualifies as a "significant cave resource," but in an effort to err on the side of conservation, I can imagine the US Forest Service deciding to keep quiet about it's location and remove map references, if there ever were any. Second, if it is an official geographic place name, it would be part of the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) the official database of all places and geographic names in the US. It is maintained by the USGS and there is a national Board of Geographic Names that oversees the name approval process. You can download the database or search it online here. This is the same data used in the TOPO! software's gazateer which is a great way to search for locations around Oregon. If you don't own the TOPO! mapping software for Oregon or Washington - you should! $99 dollars well spent at REI or GIJoes TOPO! Website Well, I searched the GNIS database and found no reference to a hellhole anywhere near Oakridge or on the WNF. No luck there. In researching old maps I was able to come up with a reference in an old map book (thanks to skooter's dad!) that referred to "Hell Hole Westfir T21S R3E" This narrows it down to a 6 mile square area and fits in with your other information. I have calls in to some folks on the Willamette NF and when I hear back, I'll let you know what I found out. Of course even if you did find it, I am not sure you should place a cache there or otherwise advertise the location if there is an official decision to protect it. Without geography, we're nowhere!

The sun tea container was ours! Thanks for retrieving it - hope their was tea left for you to enjoy? Without geography, we're nowhere!

We vote for the Saturday potluck - we can work off all the food and drink the next day pulling ivy! Looking forward to the event. Without geography, we're nowhere!

what would that be in meters?

So was a date, time, and/or place ever decided for this event? Hard to tell from all the logs what is really happening. Are we going to actually pull ivy? Everyone needs to get in some practice for Champoeg II!! [This message was edited by Maps-R-Us on March 23, 2003 at 10:37 PM.]

We were supposed to attend your event but, the h*** with that, now we will work on replacing some lost caches! Sorry you had to cancel!

This was our first cache on 6/9/2001: River Viewand the amazing thing is if you read the owners profile it was his only cache - found or placed! I suppose he could have taken a new name but interesting none the less. The cache, number 479, has over 140 logs and is one of the oldest in the city limits. Not sure of your plans, but your history may want to include most visited caches, as well.

Amazing that so many people have read this and no replies!? Try again - we cleared the inbox!

To PATW and others, quote:I thought cadastral might refer to taking bearings by star sightings or some such as opposed to metes-and-boundary procedures, which I now presume is the dominant method for cadastral surveys. survey tech is giving you a lot of good information but to learn more, I would suggest some web resources. First though, a little history! Remember that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) used to be the General Land Office (GLO) and has always been responsible for the survey of all public lands in this country. There was a law passed, thanks to Thomas Jefferson, known as the 1785 Land Ordinance that called for a public land survey system (PLSS) based on rectangular townships consisting of 36 one square mile sections. It replaced the metes and bounds system used in the Eastern US and is the basis for all surveys in the Western US today. Congress appointed surveyors for each state that worked under the direction of the Geographer of the United States (first was Thomas Hutchins). Surveyors had specific instructions regarding measurements and recording natural features of interest, e.g., minerals, salt licks, mill sites, water courses, etc. Ohio (Northwest Territory) became the proving ground for the system and the Land Act of 1796 changed numbering system of townships to east to west and then west to east, the system still in use. Subsequent legislation established sections as 640 acres. The Act of July 4, 1836 placed the responsibility for surveys with the General Land Office (GLO) where it remained until 1946 when the Bureau of Land Management was established. Today, the Bureau of Land Management has the responsibility for cadastral surveying of federal and tribal lands. Instructions are set out in a continual series of Survey Manuals. Currently, the 1973 manual is the standard. The PLSS provided a straightforward method for cadastral surveying and land identification for millions of settlers and avoided many of the disputes inherent to metes and bounds systems. The appeal of land was a strong attraction to immigrants and others and the PLSS provided the method to divide the public domain (over 3,000,000 square miles). In the interest of westward expansion, the US Congress also passed a number of laws to promote settlement and commerce in the western US. The Homestead Act, Railroad Land Grants, etc. all depended on surveyed land. Now the links for more reading: Oregon/Washington BLM cadastral survey web page should be a good start since you live in Portland. BLM's interactive map for land data Our archived Carto Cache had good information and was located at the beginning point of all surveys in the NW, the WIllamette Stone. Sorry about the long post! Hope this helps and happy hunting for caches, benchmarks and all the brass caps or survey markers that are out there all over the US!

Approved this morning and ready for a first find! Hope the math is all right! quote:And, are those archived ones open for new cachers ? Or are the first people planning on doing more ? logscaler -since most of the 'archives' are ours we should answer that the Batteries Plus is not really archived, just disabled for high water - will return soon. The Oregon Carto cache is also disabled and will probably not be a history cache when we replace it. Someone else placed a cache at the spot after ours was plundered and a second person has it as a virtual, so not much point of us doing ours there again. We thought if we waited long enough, the other caches might disappear and we could reclaim the location and the OHL. And the last one listed at the Oregon History Lessons Homepageis the Champoeg Rendezvous that was reincarneted into two other caches!

Well the cost is not really prohibitive so we say lets get serial numbers on them. We also agree that most folks will just hoard them like Tungsten Jihad silver dollars. But if we have a website to track them (thanks Mr. Snazz!) we could register all of the coins that we bought and then see who has them. Even if they never made their way around the world but just stay on someone's dresser, it would be neat to see where all of 'our' coins end up. And the folks who already have one will probably move the second one along anyway so we will be able to track some movement. Lets go for it!

Well we were enticed into action yesterday and went out and placed a new cache which will take care of two Beaver Boards in the Portland area. Watch for it soon after we get the graphics from fractal and get it approved.

We agree that their are a lot of Beaver Boards waiting for caches and we have sort of slipped on this front as well. There is one way to give the goal a big shot in the arm by converting a number of existing caches into OHL caches right away. I have seen number of new caches over the last year or so that are at beaver boards but don't note the fact. If we just converted them to OHL caches with a graphic and a little updating of the description it would be fantastic. Two I remember are: Zzzoey's Erratic Memories which is V8 on the historical marker website, and Rices Raiders' Boone There Done That (V6) which is ready for the BBoard graphic as is, fractal! Of course a lot of the Beaver Boards will have to be dual waypoint caches and take a little thought but that is what makes this sport so much fun! As for the Heritage Trees, the same thing applies sinceXYZ/NGS by Makaio includes some trees (T2) at the second point and the Foster Lilac is at the Elven Launching cache which should be both a History Leson as well as a Heritage Tree cache! I have e-mailed some of these cache owners suggesting they contact you fractal about turning them into OHL caches but a new website with a way to submit a cache for inclusion in the series might make it easier.

We would be interested in some if they are Oregon coins. What would the Oregon side look like? Can't imagine Portland coins being that useful since our area of interest is the whole state and even Washington.

DenaliNW said: quote: I'm slightly fearful that something may happen to me now. Since you were the first to grab the clone cache out of Attack of the clones - there is this fear that your bad karma will work it's way to me. Well we already had our bad karma with our first placement of the Clone cache so I think you are okay! Remember the security guards down by the river? And the better half of this team had an appendicitis 'Attack' the same day the guards found you!

Can you believe it? This was in yesterday's e-mail: quote:User ***** has contacted you with the following message: Hello took some friends geocaching today (newbies) to Batteries Plus - Oregon History Lesson #9. I have been there many times with my kids and some newbies and, well to cut it all short, when we got to the cache site it was flooded and we went down to where the cache was hidden and it wasn't in there but it was floating around not to far away so I fished it out and brought it back with me so it wont be plunderd. If you like I would be more then happy to place it back when the water receeds or you can come get it at the koa down the road. please let me know what you would like down thanks Well at least it was saved! Great guy that found it and it will be back. Maybe our luck has changed?

We were supposed to be replacing all of our lost caches but, to h*** with that! Put us down for a strong maybe.

Okay, as long-time geocachers we know that caches don’t last forever. Losing caches is just part of the game - they come and go and that is as it should be. But we are beginning to think we have bad cache karma. At least we are willing to bet we have lost our caches to a wider range of phenomena than most. The first one to disappear was the Carto Cache that was placed near the Willamette Stone in the West Hills of Portland. It was plundered outright and, amazingly enough, reported to us by a guy from Tennessee who made a special trip just to find this cache while in Portland. Darn! Lost a lot of maps, too! Next we lost the Buena Vista #2 cache we placed near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It seems the biggest hurricane to hit Mexico in decades,Hurricane Kenna, struck dead-on and washed our cache to sea. Okay, not too many visitors anyway so we can live with that, too. But then some weirdo decides to set a couple fires near the Portland Zoo late last fall. Remember the news of Portland firefighters riding the Zoo Train to protect houses? It seems they trampled right over the remains of the Wild Arboretum cache, which was reduced to a glob of molten plastic and some unrecognizable metal parts. That one hurt since it was by far our favorite cache and had over 100 finds in its first year of existence. Well today we got an e-mail from a fellow cacher regarding the Lookout View cache: quote:Night Hawk has added a log to your cache (Lookout View): I found this cache once before, and today I took my girlfriend to it (her first day of caching) The Cache is GONE!! Along with about 100 yards of the mountainside. The area the cache was at has fallen into the ocean, my GPS was pointing out over what is now the edge of a cliff. I couldn't find any of the landmarks I used to find it the first time so between that and my GPS readings I have to say that the cache was lost when the mountainside slid off. So our caches have now fallen victim to thieves, a hurricane, a fire and now a landslide. What will happen next? Well, we suppose it is time to get out there and place some new ones. Any ideas of where we could place one that would be safe from all these types of events? Anyone have a spare ammo can?

Hmmm... We thought Soup was in charge??!!

quote:Originally posted by yumitori: Perhaps we could encourage folks to improve cache quality overall, rather than single out certain forms for complaints (even when some forms are more prone to lameness than others). Ron/yumitori This is the real point of the whole discussion: That there is room in this sport for all types of 'caches' and there is always someone who will enjoy the virtual trash cans and locationless jeeps. So be it. But everyone enjoys a really well done cache. Call it cache policing if you want, but it is really what we need - a way of rating caches like restaurants so we can give encouragement to those that put in an extra effort for really clever/exciting/ingenious caches. How many of us would drop everything for another "Contact Cache?" I really think those who are dedicated to this sport should, overtime, do like Oregone suggested and work to put better and more clever caches out there to improve the overall quality. Seth!, Navdog, fractal, Bodoni, joedohn, Team Exocet and others have always gone the extra mile to put out challenging caches. We can't really encourage their effort with finds alone, since they are sometimes remote and/or hard. But encouraging logs will help and a poll system, like used in these very forums, would be fantastic for user ratings. We have slowed down our own efforts since if/when we put out another cache, it is going to be better than any before. And we are no longer seeking out every cache for higher find counts. Like others, we find it more enjoyable to seek out the good ones and try not to encourage the lousy ones. So, as Navdog put it, lets all work to tend the geocaching garden and make it a better place then we found it. To better quality! Here, here!

We use S&T for geocaching and think it works great for all of the urban caches we hunt here in Portland. It will convert the pushpins (geocache points) you make in Easygps as CSV files then import into S&Trips. Then, when you highlight the area on the screen and export the map to a pocket pc version, it will make two files - one for the map (.psp) and one for the pushpin locations (.mps). You will have to move both files to your Pocket PC in the same directory. And I believe this is only possible in S&T 2002.

quote:Originally posted by apelican:We are going to Puerto Vallarta and I had to look through most of the cache details, except the obvious Baja ones to see what caches were available down there. Did you already take your trip? Just saw this thread. We have one placed just north of PV called Buena Vista #2. No logs posted lately but would love to know if it is still there since they just had a hurricane pass nearby. It actually is in the town of San Pancho (San Fransisco) in the state of Nayarit just up the coast. Bus or car needed to get there! Here's the cache page.

I have to vote for the same weekend as last year. Not really an issue about either the crowds or the cost, which are not a problem at all. But that was the weekend the parks folks suggested when no one else would have the covered shelter and they would like to see folks do volunteer work. So as far as the get-together goes it could be anytime you want, but to get along with the parks folks we should ask them again. And think about if we want to replace, move, change or add to the caches we did last spring? Those parks folks will probably have a limit to the number of caches they want placed in the park?! But there is no limit to the amount of ivy they need pulled!

You have more caches found/placed combined then anyone else in the state and it could be argued that your logs have enticed more people in Oregon to try this sport than anyone else. You are, in fact, the de facto Oregon Ambassador for Geocaching! So using Oregon as a namesake is more than fitting - it just seems right! Of course you might be feeling guilty about not placing any Oregon History Lesson caches? Or maybe you haven't found one in every county yet? Well, until you do both, then I say keep the name and get out there and promote geocaching all over the state. And if you really feel the need to change - try changing your beer, your avatar, your job, your marital status, your favorite pub - anything but your name!