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I've been playing around with colors trying to get smoething that I really like. The one in the previous picture was a mix of portland cement, white sand, a hardener, and water. I considered using either fiber strands or wire for reinforcement, but I was concerned about their visual affect. I dont think it is necessary do to the size of the item. I created the mold using liquid latex rubber. I brushed thin layers of latex on my model rock, allowing each to dry before the next was applied. I guess I put about fifteen layers on it over a few weeks. Then, I put a really thick one on to ensure that the corners and base would be strong enough. Attached, you will find a pic of the rocks I made so far (and the mold). The real rock is in the upper middle. I am getting pretty good at matching it's appearance. I put the previously photographed rock on ebay. I figured I would place a few, give a few away, and sell a few to recoup my costs. edit to add the pic. <doh> Ahhh - I was thinking liquid latex rubber. Didn't realize it took that many weeks to get enough layers. I was thinking add a coat every hour or two, once it looks like it's sufficiently polymerized. Well, a 94 pound sack of white portland cement at $13.99 and several hundred pounds of sand ought to make a lot of artificial rocks. I think there's still about a half ton of "frac sand" someone dumped about a mile from the house. Frac sand is maybe 15 to 20 mesh - a little coarser than the fine sand we can get near Monahans, TX - lots of nice spots next to the highway one can just park the truck and start shovelling into the back of the pickup. I wonder if I can finish a "rock" by Saturday if I really work on it... should have started before 4th of July... Then should have done it last week but the water heater went out right after the holiday. I've got a boulder at the house that ought to be perfect for a 24 ounce peanut butter type jar.

there are already a couple of caches based on this. Got some links?? Sounds like something to plan on a vacation trip or a long weekend for.

Speaking of finding unusual things in the deep woods and remote mountainsides, I'm surprised no one has found a crashed aircraft or two. If a person plays with the amateur radio APRS system, there is a downloadable file called "crashall.pos" that has the coordinates to hundreds of downed aircraft in remote areas. It was compiled for CAP search and rescue so that wreckage that had been there for 30 years wouldn't be mistaken for the object of the search. I've plotted them on a map of West Texas / southeastern New Mexico and was amazed how many have accumulated over the years. Each record in the file has a description field - like color and tail number if legible, make/model, condition. I guess they are still there due to the economics of hauling the wreckage out. In East Texas and western Louisiana, I wonder how long it will be before other pieces of the space shuttle Columbia are found while geocaching, and if they will continue to surface for the next 50 years or so?

Here's the direct log link: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LU...cb-835d671cb24c OMG - Weirdest thing I've heard of being found around here geocaching was a pair of underwear that had been -um- soiled. That, and about 25 geophones I stumbled on in the pre-geocache days (for seizmic subsurface oil exploration) in a bundle complete with wiring harness between them that looked like they'd been laying out there for 20 years or so. Since so much of Texas is private property, the bodies from dope deals gone bad or "wetbacks" that didn't make it across the desert from Mexico are usually found by oil field crews, ranch hands, or hunters (or park rangers / border patrol). When a kid, we used to ride our bicycles out into a place a few miles out of town in the middle of nowhere after a rain and pick up spent .50 bullets, brass, and bomb casing fragments at an old WW2 training target site. We'd bring spent ordnance to school for show and tell and no one ever batted an eye. Never found any unexploded stuff out there. As teenagers many would go out there to do the nasty - and bring back spent ordnance. So many nifty places for geocaches that, alas, aren't really open to the public - some of which have a lot of history.

One more question - how did you get the shape? Did you use uncured latex painted over a real rock to get a negative master, and then pour into the cured mold, or did you free-hand the shape? Or use the crater left in the soil after carefully digging out a rock? Or some other casting technique?

Where did you get the tinted concrete of that color? All I've found at "Home Desperate" (Home Depot) is charcoal, a brick red, a tan, and a brown. The real rocks here in West Texas are mostly limestone, and whitish-grey. Even untinted concrete is a bit too dark. I've been thinking of using some tile cement / mortar, which is a lot more expen$ive but also comes in much lighter colors, but haven't done the experimenting yet. What kind of concrete aggregate size did you use? Ordinary Sack-crete with gravel up to pea/marble, or a finer mix like sand mix? Or did you get the special white cement (costs about 5x the gray) and then use that to more closely match the color of native rocks? Anything else special, like fiber reinforcing strands (structural strength), or even chicken wire? We have a meet n greet event this weekend I want to bring some interesting stuff to.

hehehehe. It would be mass confusion due to the "legacy" caches out there. :-) Simplest thing might just to say on the cache page something about the size - like "small glass jar" or "size of coke bottle". Around here they call them regular if it's big enough to hold a traditional type travel bug, pencil, and 3x5 pad for a log, and "micro" if they're smaller. It would be nifty to find a cache the size of a 55 gallon drum, though. There's places to hide them out here that there would be "can't find" logs :-) But I've got that boulder to hollow out - LOL ... "Container is really big but highly muggle resistant. Bring forklift, front end loader, jaws of life, or really big hydraulic jack..." "Finally found it after 2 hours of jacking and cribbing. Took Michelin P235-R15 on Ford 5 bolt chrome wheel. Left Canadian quarter and Happy Meal toy."

I use a 12 inch long needle-nosed "hose pliers" - they have a semicircle bent up at an angle on the tip and it is designed to grip and handle automotive radiator and heater hoses. Harbor Freight sells them for about $12.95 for a set of 3 - small, medium, large. They will grip an object without having to spread the jaws too wide, and they grab *around* it rather than just at two points, so you have less risk of actually pressing the container deeper into the hidey-hole. But the containers I've seen in a really hard to reach spot so far have a length of wire, nylon tie, or similar protruding "tail" to grip it by. "Bush's Field of Dreams", a multi-cache in Midland, TX uses this technique (about 6 inches of wire protruding from the lid) to extract it. But it's bigger than a film canister - about 6x the internal volume, and has a screw-top lid. I have a micro ready to hide that has a tiny rare earth magnet - incredibly strong - epoxied in the lid. Just poke any ferrous metal object in there and it will jump out of the hiding place. Of course you'll need a finger or a nonmetallic object to push the thing back in when done. Deciding whether to use that or a different cache with a nylon cable tie for retrieval (and use the magnetic one for a different hide entirely).

I agree that a good boundary between a conventional and a micro would be where a standard 3x5 inch logbook would fit, and sufficient thickness to place a typical McToy. However, maybe the criteria should be total interior volume, and have some more "steps" in size. I've seen caches that while a 3x5 pad wouldn't fit flat, it held an enormous amount of stuff. So maybe a certain number of cubic inches or fluid ounces should be the cutoff. A possibility would be that it must contain a 3x5 pad either flat or gently rolled, without having to be trimmed, and an interior volume of, say, 30 cubic inches. But I think there should be more "sizes". A Chapstick container is a different league entirely from an Altoids tin or a 35mm film canister or an M&M's mini tube. And a 16 ounce jar is really intermediate - not like an ammo can or the big rock I've been chiselling and drilling out, but a dramatic step up from the film canister class of micro. How about (suggestion 1): Nanocache (like a Chapstick container, under 1 in^3), Microcache (film canisters, prescription bottles, etc, 1 in^3 to 10 in^3), Millicache (large vitamin bottles, pint and quart jars, etc 10 in^3 to 100 in^3), Standard cache (ammo cans, half gallon to gallon jars, 100 in^3 to 1000 in^3) Kilocache (like 5 gallon buckets, vehicle tool boxes) Megacache (like 55 gallon drums, caskets, 19 inch electronic rack cabinet, ATM "Cache machine") Gigacache (like 550 gallon tank, shipping container, truck cabs, crashed aircraft fuselage, fake outhouse or small storage building) Each step up the ladder ought to be about 10x the internal volume of the one below. I guess there could be a picocache that has less than 1/10 in^3 volume, such as a waterproofed log sheet behind a magnetic sign. This would make a decontamination kit container a "millicache", as would be a 24 ounce peanut butter jar. There are 231 cubic inches in 1 US gallon, so a 5 gallon bucket would be just a tad under 1,000 cubic inches. So, we might want to use fluid ounces or even milliliters (to get to an international standard) to decide how to categorize a cache, and the boundaries might be a little different... (suggestion 2) Picocache - 1ml to 10 ml (chapstick tube) Microcache - 10ml to 100 ml (film canisters, Altoids tins) Millicache - 100 ml to 1 liter (4 ounce to quart jar) Standard cache - 1 to 10 liters internal volume (quart jar up to 2.5 gallon) Kilocache - 10 to 100 liters (5 gallon bucket about 20 liters) Megacache - 100 to 1000 liters (55 gallon drum is about 200 liters) Gigacache - 1000 to 10,000 liters - (like a sea shipping container) Teracache - over 10,000 liters - (like an entire house or cavern) I'm kinda rambling... A related suggestion might be the minimum and maximum interior dimensions. A 10 foot joint of 2 inch PVC pipe capped with a drain cleanout (376.8 cubic inches) has more volume than a 1 gallon Sun Tea jar, but most travel bugs won't go into that narrow pipe, and things can stick. I'd want to have a clue that the 2.5 inch diameter travel bug I hauled 300 miles will fit.

I've done that myself, especially at WalMart. Signs you're caching too much - when you go thru the toy section at WalMart for swag on the way to automotive for more oil and air filters - again. When you buy yet another backpack just to carry swag, logbooks, camera, and spare batteries for the GPS. When you eagerly await a service call on a specific oil well lease 175 miles away because there is a new geocache nearby.

Yep, I think her legs are a little shorter compared to body size, even when found in the wild. We let the one we found at Field Day loose where it could mosey along looking for love in all the wrong places :-) Any spiderlings yet, or no boyfriend for her? Gee - we hijacked the thread I think.. Wonder if someone has started a thread on interesting critters encountered while geocaching... So far I think the most interesting thing were the wild or maybe abandoned kittens living in some thick bushes that also housed a well camouflaged geocache. That was in a city park though, with a bunch of houses right across an adjacent alley, and they weren't as wild as some I've encountered in oil fields. One of the kittens actually gave away the geocache because it was hanging from a branch deep inside a bush, and he was swatting at it as it swung back and forth. And on a night cache we stumbled upon a family of rather bold raccoons that stayed maybe 10 feet away and begged like they were accustomed to people throwing them food.

I think Lulu's legs may be a bit shorter, though. :-)

Here's another harmless but creepy looking geocache buddy that is looking for love in all the wrong places this time of year in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Then there was the cache that had some feral kittens living beside it.

Worst geo-injury so far - was on hands and knees for several minutes fishing a cache out of its hiding place, shifted, and felt this sharp stinging on the calf of the leg. Stood up and this huge scorpion fell out of my pants leg. Fortunately the species around here (West Texas) is the fairly low toxicity c.vitattus and not the similar looking more notorious species found in Arizona. One afternoon I got tangled in barbed wire once, and once had a bird decide to deliver its load of precision guided munitions in an aerial bombardment. When the cache page says bring a pokin' stick, it means don't stick your hands in there without making sure there is nothing coiled up on the cache with fangs and rattles escaping the desert heat or winter cold. Of course there wasn't a spare change of underwear for at least 60 miles :-)

One of the toughest multi-caches so far was in a local historical cemetery. There are a lot of pioneers and early settlers buried there. And yes, the actual cache is in the cemetery. It's been there for about 2 years and had a few travel bugs pass through. It's hiding in plain sight, and looks exactly like it belongs there. Some of the headstones tell quite a story. Lots and lots of history. Plus, lots and lots of numbers for coordinate offsets to make a wonderful multi-cache that involves a tour of the regions' history.