aniyn

Ah-ha! Mystery solved!

I took it with me. I'm going to try and find the owner - shouldn't be too hard since that cache has only been found 10 times.

I went out today to check on a series of hiking caches I own. On the way between the fifth and sixth caches I past a hat on the ground. Normally I wouldn't bother with a grimey old upside-down hat, but this is in the middle of nowhere, well away from any roads. So I flipped it over. And almost fell over laughing.

I did a cache exactly like that once. Traditional, but you had to read the hint to get the combination for the lock. Unfortunately I had simply thrown 30 or so low D/T caches into my gps to do on a road trip, and had no access to the combination and no possible way to solve it. I wasn't really impressed. I didn't go all crazy and wreck the cache, but I did feel like the CO had wasted my time. If the cache requires research to solve, even if that research is just reading the cache page, please rate it accordingly.

How is a looney in any sense "abnormal"?

If one keeps his camelback in the refrigerator and changes the water at least once a week, then you will never have any problems with mold etc. As to the pack any thing that is small and holds what you need is what you should get. Kelty has some good packs. Go one farther, and keep the empty bladder in the freezer.

I found a cache like that once. Turns out it had be archived for 11 and a half months when I found it. I went back and removed the container, and then reused it for one of my hides. It's just litter in a situation like that.

I had an underwater cache stolen before it was found. I spent almost a year working out all of the details - how to make it waterproof, where best to put it (way more complicated than it sounds). It took 9 days to finally get published, and 4 days after that when the first cachers went to go find it it was already gone. All they found was the anchor on the shore. The worst part? I know whoever found it just threw it in the river. Still boils my blood when i think about it.

At least you read the guidelines. In a perfect world this shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world. Even under current rules there are far too many unmaintained caches. Not to be patronizing, but once you've been doing this for a while longer you'll understand why the rules are what they are: Finding caches that are full of water, have moldy/gooey contents, or have inaccurate coordinates is not fun. It just ends up being a headache for everyone else to deal with, and makes the overall experience worse for everyone. How many people would keep caching if their first 2 finds had an inch of putrid water in each? And to be honest the "Can't someone else do it?" attitude is very depressing. It's your cache, and you can't reasonably expect other people to look after it for you. Replacing a wet log is pointless; Unless you address the issue of a non-watertight container first nothing will change. But why should someone else have to spent the money required to do this? I wouldn't do much geocaching at $7 a find. At this point you're just romanticizing a concept. Imagine if you went through all that: Packing a 70 pound pack for 4 days through broken, wet, bug infested terrain. After all that, you discover that the guy who hid that cache goofed on the coordinates and you can't find anything. Or that you do get there and discover half of a tupperware container full of water and nothing else - because 2 years earlier the container lid had cracked and no one was there to do anything about it. Groundspeak already has rules about this sort of thing, as a few overzealous helicopter pilots have made it necessary. If you aren't willing to maintain a geocache, try leaving a waymark instead.

That's great for you then. However, the basic flaw in you entire argument against "the pro ratio crowd" is you automatically assume they're all idiots who can't use more than 1 source of information. "The pro-information crowd" would quite frankly be a better label, if you insist on using one, since more information on which to base their cache searches on is all they're after. In the meantime, no one is taking away the raw counts. They're not going anywhere. And the ratio is in a tab and you cannot see it unless you want to. The problem with raw counts is fundamentally the same as the problem with ratios - they're both dependent on sample sizes. A ratio is useless with a very small sample size, but a raw count becomes useless with a large sample. And if a cache only gets a 1% favorite rate? That means 99% of the premium members who found it didn't think it worthy of being in their top 10%. While it may still be an enjoyable cache, it would certainly not be an amazing one either.

I'm a big fan of iNova flashlights. Mine uses cr123's, but their newer models use AA's.

We did a bike ride on the trans-canada trail this winter. 4 inches of snow, -20*c. 6 and a half hours, 25km. Would do again.

Why on earth would you do that? You just sealed all that moisture into a brand new container, and there's only 1 thing that can happen now - a moldy, gooey, smelly mess. If you can't sign a log because it's too wet, then don't. I don't think any cache owner who lets a cache get to that state will care. It's best to leave problems like that for the cache owner. That being said, sometimes a cache can degrade to the point when it stops being a cache, and starts just being garbage. If the CO is no longer active, then it's best to either archive and remove the cache or informally adopt the cache and maintain it yourself. I'd make sure the cache is actually archived before removing it though, as it's best to leave *something* for others to find in the meantime.

That's terrible

This topic isn't so much a can or worms as a barrel of rattlesnakes. Personally I don't much like it, but if it's legal than it's out of my hands.

Well i can't really tell you what to make but keep these things in mind: - Don't make it too short! People make special trips to do night caches. - Try to keep tripping hazards to a minimum. No bushwhacking please. - Place markers where they can't be covered by leaves or other debris - Flashlights attract muggle attention - pick your location carefully - Do something original! Follow the dots can be fun, but try to be creative. I've been planning a night cache for around 6 months now, but I want to do something that'll blow people's socks off.

The multi-logging question aside, you may find you don't want to list it as a multi in this case. As an owner you'll quickly discover that multi and mystery caches see FAR FEWER visitors than a traditionals. Not to mention all the "We found the first 5 but we got stumped on #6, are you sure it's there?" logs multi's tend to accumulate. My recommendation is just to make it a series - it's considerably less work to set up and maintain, and will see more traffic to boot.

I'm at 25 favs on 21 caches. That works out to 1.19 F/H. It's 1.2 on active caches though, as someone fav'd one of my archived caches.

I've done one in a pedestrian underpass of a highway. It was a puzzle cache, with posted coordinates at one end of the tunnel.

Man, and you thought travelbugs going missing was a pain in the butt.

This is the one I wanted to post last night - GC28WBX.

I make these out of blank dog tags. I'm a big fan of the handmade sig items, and collect them whenever I see them.

I have GC2H4QT. There's also ..hmm, the database seems to have down in the last 30 seconds. I have a multi in an old mine, and there's another cache about 30 km north of the one I linked to at the mouth of a ~1 km long tunnel.

Maybe not a great choice for rough terrain, but it does get good mileage. Plus when you say "To the geo-mobile"!" people will know what you're talking about.

Try telling the aussies that they pronounce their country's name wrong - most of the aussies I've ever met have said quite clearly "Australier". If nothing else you should be able to get a rise out of them.