RPW
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Posts posted by RPW
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I am opposite in that I rarely read the Geocaching topics forum but always read The Hunt The Unusual forum. The former has way to many topics in it most of which are (to an old cacher like myself with limited time) boring. The Hunt The Unusual forum, on the other hand, has mostly interesting topics because they are, well, unusual.
I agree though that there is a whole lot of overlap. But same could be said for many of the forums.
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Team Tigger is right, such a cache is a virtual cache and CGing.com limits these to areas where a real cache can not normally be placed, say inside an airport terminal or under a bridge or where land manager permission can not be obtained. Often, however, with a bit of creative thinking it is possible to make a virtual cache into a real cache via placing a container close to the site in question and then making the hunt into an "offset" or "multi-cache." Some people have the opinion that if we, as a group, just "give up" and take the easy route of placing a virtual instead of going through the hurdles of placing a real cache then the land managers will eventually say "look, why bother ever having real caches when virtuals are good enough?" I.e., we need to assert our rights to be able to place caches on public lands. All of the above are some reasons why, I believe, GCing.com limits virtuals.
That being said, there are some DNR properties where caches can not be placed. Nature preserves in particular. In those spots virtuals will be placed. The DNR's non-rule #46 talks about virtual caches and does not limit them.
As I have mentioned in my posts about Prophetstown SP, obtaining DNR permission can be a pain especially compared to just being able to put out caches whenever and whereever we wanted such as we were able to do in previous years. However permission is supposed to granted unless there is a good reason. By working with them the park managers can actually come up with improvements to our cache placements. After all they probably know the park better than most of us. I encourage anyone who wishes to put a cache in a SP to go through the permission process and place a real cache instead of just going the virtual route.
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Got the P-town SP caches approved! At least by the state park system. Now to place them, get the final co-ordinates, and get GC.com to approve them.
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Still waiting for P-town approval. I have called Tom (the property manager)every 3-4 days. As I mentioned earlier they are very busy getting the new park ready. Plus Tom's assistant has been out of the office for a bit and thus they are more overloaded than expected. So I patiently wait.
I am sort of under the impression that they may thinking that they need to do actual work for the caches. I.e., instead of just signing on the 'approved' line and letting me do all of the work of placing the caches, maintaining the caches, etc. they may think that they have to do the placement, etc. But then I may be reading more into our conversations than is really there. I am sure that Tom is a consientious park manager that wants to make sure that everything runs smoothly and thus he takes his time to do things right.
However the entire process is making me think harder on why I place caches in general. Why do I go through such hurdles to provide entertainment to a bunch of strangers? I've always prided myself on putting out quality caches -- cammoed ammo boxes, good swag, a explanatory note, and so on. While I am not rich, the money spent on such caches (about $25) is not much of an issue. Heck, in a little while the price of the gasoline spent to drive to the cache might be more than that. [
] But what is more precious is the amount of time spent. The long letter I wrote to P-town, the filling in of the application form, and worse, these repeated calls are making the cache placement process harder than before. For these particular caches in P-town, the answer to "why?" is obvious to me. I want to bring people to Indiana's newest state park and show them that there is "more than corn in the northwest part of Indiana" (to steal a line from Indiana Beach.) Call it local pride. I just wish the process was faster and easier. Perhaps next time it will be.Oh well, that is my rant for the day. Have a fun geocaching weekend!
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I am still waiting on an OK from the park manager at Prophetstown. They have been very busy in getting the camping area ready and general spring clean up thus my cache requests have been put to the side. I do have "permission"
from Tom B. (the manager) to call every couple of days in order to see how the requests are doing. Certainly having to go through the formal process is a pain however perhaps it will make for better caches in the state parks and for a better relationship with the park people. Time will tell.
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Hey, we are good to go. France park was ok with having the InGeo spring picnic. Sat. May 21st. Chris (Shydog) will be posting the official web page within a couple of days. Hope to see you there.
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Ah the wonders of a decentralized organization -- if we can even call InGeo organized.
So it appears that we will have a spring picnic in May. Hurrah!
Now to decide where and whom will host. France park has the advantage of being more-or-less in the east-west middle of the state and not too far north. There is camping (we can probably have our own private spot), mountain bike trails, disk golf, swimming, scuba diving, and lots of trails through the 500+ acres. As Kid Crazy once put it, France park is the "hidden gem of the wabash." Since is not a state park it generally does not appear on maps and it also charges a seperate admission ($1.50/person) from our normal Indiana state park passes. When I wrote to IndyDiver and Deermark a couple days before I made this forum both them thought that France park would be good. IndyDiver has fond memories of scuba diving in the park years ago and, of course being from the southern part of the state, Deermark would prefer something close although I think he and Daggy would go anywhere in order to geocache.
The Kid loves the park but due to work can not sponser an event.The park does not currently have any geocaches -- this is a story best told by "persona non gratia" Chris -- however we are hopeful that the new management will be receptive to caching. They certainly were interested in hosting a picnic. Chris and I will find out more this upcoming Tuesday - March 29.
All that being said, Bonnyville SP is also very nice and certainly Mary & Gary put on good events. I still remember the bitter cold wind of the 2003 spring picnic being tempered by their generosity and inventiveness.
I will get hold of Mary & Gary via email or phone and see if we can figure out who should host and where.
-- Rick
PS to Bjorn: You are right, the midwest geobash in July should not intefere with an InGeo spring picnic in May.
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Is anyone planning on hosting a 2005 InGeo spring picnic? Should we even have one with the Midwest Geobash being held in NW Ohio during June? Traditionally -- "tradition" being all of 2 years -- the InGeo spring picnic is held in the north part of the state while the fall picnic is held in the south part. However there is no reason to hold onto this pattern. Geoist from Ft. Wayne told me that they are not planning to host this year (they did so in 2004) because of the midwest geobash. Any other opinons on the subject?
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Mainly for Car54 but others might be interested.
I finally -- whew! -- got my submission into the Prophetstown state park people. We will see if they like caching. I expect to get an answer next week altough they are doing a lot of prairie burning and may be too busy to consider my request. I wrote a nice cover letter in addition to filling in the official form.
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By the way, why is it that here in Illinois there are trash cans all over our parks and admission is free but in Indiana they charge you to get in and they ask you to haul your own trash out? You'd think with all the money they make off their parks they could buy some trash cans.
Maybe because your gasoline tax is $0.30/gal while ours is $0.18? That your sales tax is 6.25% and ours is 6% (just recently hiked to that level), that your "tax freedom day" is Apr. 11 and ours is Apr. 7th? Perhaps your parks are subsidized by all those extra taxes.
BTW: The above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It would be nice to have better Indiana state parks.
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I'll admit that I often miss the "are you sure" (both in TBs and in pocket query deletion) question. Don't know why and I am slowly training myself out of missing the question but for some reason it is easy thing to miss.
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Speaking as a simple geocacher I echo the sentiments of several others: Just give us something that works. Personally I do not care if geocaching.com runs a caching policy database or geocachingpolicy runs one or whomever. This bickering is just getting in the way of providing what I suspect 99% of geocachers want -- a place to look up public land policies.
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Assuming that you are heading back on I-65 from Indy to Chitown.
In Rensallaer
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GCJNW5 - Bside park and grab. Tricky. I haven't found it yet.
GCJ2VV - Soggy Bottom. This was a fun one. Simple but fun.
In Lafayette / Battleground
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GCH160 - WHT: North. Mine but I get a lot of compliments on it so maybe it is good. About a 1 mile round-trip walk.
GCHC4Q - The Prophet's Trail. Fairly simple multi. Although the container at the end isn't that great.
There are other caches on the way back north but they are much further off the interstate. Unfortunately the area between Indy and Chicago is pretty much a wasteland of farm fields. The parks tend to be small and either county or city. Of course this is what Geochacing is good for -- finding those out of way spots.
Historical is the oldest cache in Indiana -- GCB8 - the Biolermaker cache.
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[Carr Lake] It's a scenic spot, and we got to observe a pair of gigantic water fowl taking off from the surface of the lake, their wing tips beating a tatoo on the water, as they strained to get lift, and the sound of their half-honk grunting in effort--it's an interesting nature image which stays with us until this day.
Sounds wonderful. Too bad the 6-word cache description did not elude to this. Otherwise we might have stopped.
While people local to an area tend to hit every cache around -- lame description or not -- visitors to an area rely heavily on the cache description and sometimes the logs in deciding which caches to seek out. The ISQ cache are wonderfully descriptive and are tempting to seek out. Or to use a water-themed basis, the BearGrass Creek cache description is also tempting. If we had driven back on 15 yesterday when we had more time for caching we probably would have gone to the ISQs and BearGrass Creek. As it is we hit other caches on a different route. In any case the Carr lake description of "Placed at carr lake boat ramp" just does not entice the visitor. Now that we have your personal recommendation we will put the Carr Lake micro on our to-do list.
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I guess our PDA's are simpler then yours RPW , we do not load the pictures , just the text ...
That is what I ended up doing. My geocaching PDA -- cost $50 so I don't care if I fall into the creek with it -- only has 2 MB memory and so had to go picture-less. I also loaded up my non-geocaching PDA -- cost $400 but lots of memory and color -- with the pictures and text.
My wife and I didn't have time to do any geocaches on the way up to Goshen -- we are up north to attend a funeral instead of to have fun -- but while she was driving I turned on the GPSr and told her about the caches we were passing. She was interested in the ISQ caches because of the history behind them. Our conversation around Warsaw went something like this (I probably don't have the ISQ numbers correct):
(me) "Passing ISQ #66" ... read a bunch of description out load to her
(her) ... some questions and clarifications ...
(me) "Passing ISQ #67" ... read a bunch of description
(her) ... some comments ...
(me) "Passing ISQ #68" ... read bunch
(her) "What does the Hatfield/McCoy feud have to do with that?"
(me) "Don't know, guess it was because someone named Hatfield was buried there."
(me) "Oh, we are coming up to a non-ISQ micro"
(her) "What does it say?"
(me) "On the boat ramp at Carr lake"
(both of us): "Lame description!"
Anyway, the ISQs are fun even if we can't look for them. Good car conversation.
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Geocaching is about fun, get with the program. So what if a clue is useless to you, to another person it may be a treasure.
There may be some "useless" hints that are "a treasure" but I doubt it. And there are some hints that are just ... mean. Tonight I was out hunting a 1/1 micro. An inch of snow on the ground. The temperature around 20 F (-5 C). Wind blowing. My flashlight running out of battery juice. Branches hitting my freezing face. I finally decide to look at the hint. Decode it and find out that it reads,
you shouldn't need a hint. This one is way to easy
Right ... I say sarcastically. If it is easy enough not to need a hint -- and I'll grant that it is in the daylight, in the warmth -- then don't put down a freaking hint! Leave that space blank. Don't make me decode it in the cold while I am in the middle of looking for the cache.
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I just found out one bad thing in regards to the ISQ caches: the pictures take up way too much room in my PDA. I least I suspect that it is the ISQs. I'm off to Goshen-land tomorrow and while loading up the GPSr and Palm with the nearest 450 caches (many of which are ISQs) the poor Palm ran out of memory space. Ah well, that what happens when a cache series is well documented.
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For what it is worth, I am chiming in on the vote to keep the # as well. Who does not matter but the # is useful.
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See: Walking with the Dead
I would hardly call that a copy other than the theme of the series. The one line description makes it just another lame micro...
I agree. Despite 6dog's jokes about "throwing" the canisters out of the window, he and his team really do a good job with the ISQ caches. Any bozo can grab a film canister, stuff some paper into it, put it anywhere and call it a cache (like the above.) SixDogTeam does not do this. Instead he takes the time and effort to make the placement meaningful. Kudos on a class act.
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You can pick up film canisters at any film processing place (wal-mat, drug strores, etc.) They usually just toss them out anyway. Just ask the clerks at the counter and they will often give you a bunch.
Many people use the film canisters for cache-in-trash-out (CITO) containers but others use them for micros. They are generally waterproof enough to survive our spring thaws although I have certainly run across my share of wet soggy moldy ones.
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First circle is a GPS satellite.
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Quite frankly I do not understand why everyone thinks this is such a positive step.
It is only "positive" in the sense that the rules could have been a lot worse -- e.g., fees, checking on the cache once a month, or a complete ban. Look at Ohio or Michigan. I suspect that if you asked most people they would have prefered the older no-rules-but-moderated-by-geocaching.com standard to still be in force. What we have now is "workable" -- at least in theory -- and so we will work with it.
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The three links that I have:
http://www.in.gov/nrc/policy/46.pdf -- the official policy (but no form.)
http://www.in.gov/nrc/minutes/nov04_agenda/item9.pdf -- the form via November's agenda. This link may be temporary.
http://www.azimuthconstruction.com/geocaching/Rule46.pdf -- Geode Hunter scanned in the policy and made a click-and-fill PDF document. It is available on what I suppose is his personal site. However it may not be very official.
I wish there were better links but these are all I can find. Unfortunately the DNR does not seem to publish their forms as standalone permanent downloads.
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o...if the Pokagon Property Manager is of the same mindset as the day-manager we encountered...we're sorry if we screwed up caching in Pokagon for everybody by trying to do the right thing.
You've got to do the right thing even if it does screw up everything else. Under the table will just cause problems in the long run.
I am going to approach Indiana's newest state park -- Prophetstown -- sometime this month in regards to putting a cache there. As Car54 posted earlier the park was not very receptive late last year. Maybe with the new rules they will like it more. Wish me luck!
] But what is more precious is the amount of time spent. The long letter I wrote to P-town, the filling in of the application form, and worse, these repeated calls are making the cache placement process harder than before. For these particular caches in P-town, the answer to "why?" is obvious to me. I want to bring people to Indiana's newest state park and show them that there is "more than corn in the northwest part of Indiana" (to steal a line from Indiana Beach.) Call it local pride. I just wish the process was faster and easier. Perhaps next time it will be.
from Tom B. (the manager) to call every couple of days in order to see how the requests are doing. 
The Kid loves the park but due to work can not sponser an event.
A Sad Day In Charlestown State Park, In.
in Midwest
Posted
In order to deflect this discussion from the personal "you" to the universal "you", I point out that of my 10 cache hides most have land manager permission. After all it is only polite to ask.
Now taking the discussion into a more general direction, I (and many others) do assert that public ground is subject to proscription instead of prescription; in order words to a list of "can not" rather than a list of "can." As examples, public lands do not have lists that says "picnics are allowed", "playing frisbee is allowed", "wading the creek is allowed", "bicycle riding is allowed" or even "hunting is allowed." These are assumed rights for American public lands. Instead public lands are subject to a list of forbidden activites such as "no hunting" or "no mountain bikes" (both almost universally regulated these days) or "no off-trail hiking" and so on.
Of course proscribed lists can not cover all circumstances nor list all forbidden activites. The lists have to be general. Many geocachers subscribe to the "frisbee" theory; i.e., if frisbee playing is not barred in the public land then geocaching (unless specifically prohibited or regulated) is also not forbidden. As a general rule of thumb this idea seems to be a good one.
The original couple of posts were bemoaning the fact that the Charlestown SP managers removed pre-existing caches without notifying the cache owners or a caching organization. Further posts talked about if caches were even going to be allowed in Charlestown and, if so, the number allowed. We are getting off of the specific topic of Charlestown into a more general topic. If you feel like continuing this discussion then a new forum topic should be started. I point out that the current topic -- public land rights -- has been debated many times before and I urge you to read past forum postings before starting up this topic again.