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aniyn

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Posts posted by aniyn

  1. HAHA cool.. did you take away the trash ?

    or put it into a geocache near by, that will be trading up in many cases :-)

     

    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.

  2. 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.

     

    hat.jpg

     

    And almost fell over laughing.

  3. 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.

  4. If you buy the camelback style you also need to buy the kit to clean it.

    A while ago a lot of articles came out on the bacteria build up in water bottles of people who don't clean them. The problem is worse in camelbacks because it is hard to dry them. A great breeding ground for mold and bacteria.

    Once you price the cleaning kit, I think it's a lot easier to buy a water bottle that can be cleaned well.

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

    Can't (and wouldn't) the next cacher take the hint and replace the logbook, or dry and seal the cache?

    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.

    I think nothing would beat a true find out in the wild. No paths to go by, no footsteps to follow, not even a place to park your car within a hundred miles.

    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.

  7. What I am claiming is that caches with very high raw counts have a pretty good chance of being a cache I will enjoy. Caches with a lower raw count have a bigger probability I might not enjoy the cache. Those with low raw count and even cache with zero raw counts are might be the caches I enjoy most. Who knows, it's possible that those with higher ratios I will enjoy more. But this isn't what I'm trying to find out. I'm just trying to avoid caches that suck - as fizzymagic would say. I don't need a ratio to do this. I believe that the ratio would in fact be less useful, because I might not ever look at the cache in touristy location with only 1% favorites. If 50 people liked the cache, I think I will probably enjoy it. Perhaps not as much as a hike or a puzzle, but I will likely enjoy it. (I still look at the cache page so there is still the chance I won't look for it, if there are other caches with lower raw count that seem more interesting at the moment.)

    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.

  8. So what I did since I happened to have some of the same size capsules with me (we carry a plastic bag with us that has SWAG for trade as well as dry logs and a few pens, etc.) was place the damp log in a new capsule and closed the lid.

     

    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.

  9. I've been practicing making my own (dehydrated) soups. I've only done it a couple of times so far, but I tend to just forage around the house for dried foods, and then go from there. I think last time I made lentil and sun-dried tomato, using tomatoes I grew and dried myself. I think there were some dried peppers involved too. I've added jerky in the past as well, and it seemed to work in small quantities. Too much and things got a bit saltier than I'd like.

    On the trail all I have to do is add a bit of water and boil it over a gel can stove. Keeps things light on short trips.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. Would it be safe to assume that a public tunnel that goes under a major road wouldn't be allowed, since it goes under a major road? Ya know, even if the tunnel is public? :unsure:

     

    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.

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