Waterboy

Mr. DisQuoi, I believe you should define what you want in an excellent cache. In a previous forum I defined a good cache as follows: 1. It must be a physically demanding hike. Absolute minimum is one hour getting in, one hour getting out on a trail with elevation changes. In general, the harder, the better. This does not include time in area looking under rocks or in tree stumps for the actual cache. (Roads are not trails.) 2. A beautiful and/or interesting final location. 3. Environmental interest. First this means quantity of animal life to view and lack of quantity of human life to view. Plant life, water, and geology are included. 4. Ability to make the in/out process a loop hike. I like to return on a different trail than the one I came in on. 5. I would prefer the cache to be in a place that I have never been to a place that I have been. To change this from a good cache to an excellent cache I would change first, and most important item, to “Absolute minimum is two hours getting in, two hours getting out.” You and I have a different definition of an excellent cache since you only budget three hours for the excellent cache. Like with real estate, the three most important things for a cache are location, Location, and LOCATION.

Congratulations CCC. If you are four people, you are truly fortunate to have four that can work so well together. We are amazed. If you are one, we are equally amazed. Waterboy With Wife (www)

Congratulation Rich. Keep up the good work.

Thanks guys. This was a surprise.

Check http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=3657 "After parking the car, we were only 7/10's of a mile from the cache. 7/10's of a mile! One of the unwritten rules of caching (someone take this down, please) is that there is not always a correlation between the proximity of the parking area to the cache site and the ease of the trek. I wonder how many people have entered that clearing, having negotiated the slippery, wet, moss-covered rocks that make up a portion of the trail only to see the hill that lays before them and have, at the very least, uttered some sort of an expletive (or, at the very most, turned around and headed back to the car). There is probably some money to be made if you owned the bottled oxygen concession. This having been said, we gamely climbed this hill and found the cache. Now after this climb one might expect a cache container slighly smaller than a garage, but NO! We found a container one step up from a micro-cache and there was no way that the baseball we had carried up the hill was going to fit. So, TNLN (Took Nothing, Left Nothing). This is a great location and certainly one that we never would have experienced without Geocaching. Thanks for a great hike and view. - Bob & Jill

Check http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=3657 "After parking the car, we were only 7/10's of a mile from the cache. 7/10's of a mile! One of the unwritten rules of caching (someone take this down, please) is that there is not always a correlation between the proximity of the parking area to the cache site and the ease of the trek. I wonder how many people have entered that clearing, having negotiated the slippery, wet, moss-covered rocks that make up a portion of the trail only to see the hill that lays before them and have, at the very least, uttered some sort of an expletive (or, at the very most, turned around and headed back to the car). There is probably some money to be made if you owned the bottled oxygen concession. This having been said, we gamely climbed this hill and found the cache. Now after this climb one might expect a cache container slighly smaller than a garage, but NO! We found a container one step up from a micro-cache and there was no way that the baseball we had carried up the hill was going to fit. So, TNLN (Took Nothing, Left Nothing). This is a great location and certainly one that we never would have experienced without Geocaching. Thanks for a great hike and view. - Bob & Jill

On files with the extensions .tfw and .ftd. The .tfw files are used by ESRI GIS software such as ArcView or ArcGIS. They contain six numbers in ASCII format. These are: 1. The dimension of a pixel in map units in the x direction (the x-scale). 2. Rotation term for row. 3. Rotation term for column. 4. The dimension of a pixel in map units in the y direction (the y-scale). 5. The x coordinate of the center of the upper-left pixel in map units. 6. The y coordinate of the center of the upper-left pixel in map units. For most data downloaded from PASDA: A. Items 2 and 3 are zero B. Item 4 is the negative of item 1 and both are expressed in meters. C. The x and y coordinates are the UTM coordinates in meters. Please be careful you do not jump from one UTM zone to another. Jump occurs at W078º00.00’. I do not know about the .ftd extension. Possibly it is similar to the .tfw but for MapInfo GIS software. [This message was edited by Waterboy on April 18, 2002 at 10:27 AM.]

This is a PUBLIC THANK YOU.

If you are moving to Pennsylvania please be aware of the maps that are made available free for this state. (Or should I call it the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?) It seems that we have more available than our neighboring states. First, we have about 90% of the State Game Land (SGL) maps available in PDF format. See SGL. While the scale is not great, they appear to be better on trail and parking areas than any of the better defined detailed topos I have seen. This is from experience hiking them. The State Forests are available at State Forests. These, unfortunately, even have a courser scale than the SGL maps. They are in GIF format and often electronic scotch taping together is required. The final good source is from Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) from the Penn State University (PSU) computers at PASDA. There are a fantastic number of quality maps, but like everything it has its faults. This often requires special Global Information System (GIS) software. Please enjoy your map search and WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA.

What makes a good cache? Or in this case, the best cache we have found? Since people look at it differently, we will get many different answers. I will list my reasons for the picking the best before I list my bests. To start off with we are hikers first, and geocachers second. We will take good hikes, even in areas where there are no caches to be found, or only caches that we have already found. Now for the criteria to judge a good cache. 1. It must be a physically demanding hike. Absolute minimum is one hour getting in, one hour getting out on a trail with elevation changes. In general, the harder, the better. This does not include time in area looking under rocks or in tree stumps for the actual cache. (Roads are not trails.) 2. A beautiful and/or interesting final location. 3. Environmental interest. First this means quantity of animal life to view and lack of quantity of human life to view. Plant life, water, and geology are included. 4. Ability to make the in/out process a loop hike. I like to return on a different trail than the one I came in on. 5. I would prefer the cache to be in a place that I have never been to a place that I have been. Now our choice for best cache - L.bug by cache_ninja. This rates well in every aspect, except that we had been there before. It has the added attraction of another high rated ninja cache that can easily be hit on the same loop hike. This summer we plan to spend some time in the north woods locating even better caches. We are optimistic. [This message was edited by Waterboy on March 31, 2002 at 08:20 AM.]

What does that little magic box made by Garmin or Magellan do? Simply put it does a three dimensional analysis of what DisQuoi wants to do in a two dimensional problem. (A purist may argue that the magic box does it in four dimensions by the way time is calculated.) georgeandmary asks "when are we ever going to use this?" What do you are doing when you geocache? DisQuoi wants to do a simplified GPS position calculation. GREAT IDEA. You are teaching a simplified understanding of the great toy that we have. (I am sure many will say that the calculations are still not very simple.)