secondgunman

Here's a quote from the article: “I commend the guy who called us. He thought it was a bomb, our department thought it was, and the county thought it was,” Mangina said. “If you ever see something that looks like or even resembles a bomb, you need to take it seriously.” And what exactly does a bomb look like? Because, obviously, all bombs look exactly the same......and everyone must know what they look like since everyone involved thought that this looked like one. Right??

Yes... this does show up on the forum pretty often. Also try this thread. I've got a post in one of those threads with a link to a list of the old arrows.

Personally, I don't have an issue with this type of challenge provided the requirements are spelled out in detail. You've got to list exactly which cache types/icons count and which don't. When we went up to GW XII this summer, this was one of our goals. How we did depends on what you count. My stats page says we got ten cache types in one day, but we also did the lab caches, found several benchmarks, and a couple of waymarks. That list could fall anywhere in the 10-13 range, depending on what you count. The devil is in the details.

You also have to have a unique e-mail address. I created an account for my niece, who is really too young to have her own address, and tried to simply use my existing address with her account. The system bounced it because of that. Her account now has my work e-mail attached to it.

I'll chime in on this, just for the sake of providing a datapoint. I've completed the Arkansas counties challenge, and am thinking about working on Oklahoma next. When I did the Arkansas counties, there was a group of four of us who were doing that one, the DeLorme challenge, and the state parks challenge all at the same time. For those keeping score, that's 75 counties, 52 state parks, and 43 DeLorme pages. We figured our best bet would be to knock them all out at once. Sometimes we went solo, sometimes in groups of two or three or four, just depending on who needed what on a particular trip. When all was said and done, finishing up those three challenges in Arkansas took me roughly 117 hours in the car, five nights in hotels, and roughly 5,600 miles driven. It was, by turns, the most fun I've ever had and the most miserable I've ever been. I seem to remember it took six trips to do it all. Some were simple day-trips. One was a three-day trek from extreme western Arkansas to the very south-east corner of the state, then all the way across the southern border to the south-west corner, then back home. The others fell somewhere in between. It could have been done much faster than that and with a lot fewer miles in the car, but I kind of did it as I could. I started the three challenges on 6/11/2011 and finished them on 1/16/2012, so right at seven months in total. A "counties challenge" in a state with just four or five counties seems like a joke after that....

Setting aside the whole special equipment or training argument, I always look at D/T like this. Difficulty is how hard it is to find the cache once you're at the coordinates. Terrain is how hard it is to get to the coordinates. My obvious example of a D1/T5 cache would be a large ammo can inside a tree stump....on top of a mountain that you have to bushwhack a mile with 2200 feet of elevation gain to reach the summit....on land that's known for having wild hogs and rattlesnakes six feet long and as big around as your thigh. There's a cache near here just like that, though it's rated at 4/5. It's a bear to get to, but easy to find once you're there. I think that one is incorrectly rated, but that's just me. The whole special equipment thing makes sense, but needs a little common sense. A cache that absolutely requires equipment or training that no reasonably normal person has needs a little boost in terrain rating. A cache on an island near shore in a place cold enough that the water freezes for several months a year, making the cache accessible on foot, shouldn't be an automatic T5. A cache 100 feet off the ground on a 300 foot cliff, requiring either a 100 foot climb or a 300 foot rappel should be an automatic T5 since either approach requires specialized gear and training that anyone can get but that not many have. A little common sense goes a long way.

I keep meaning to add a snake bite kit, with the intention of never needing it.

I have the free topos from GPSFileDepot on my Oregon 450 and am quite pleased with those. I've been using those for a few years and have nothing but good things to say about them. I also have routable maps from garmin.openstreetmap.nl and haven't had any problems with those at all. They're "routable" in the sense that the unit will give you turn by turn directions ON SCREEN and not in the sense that the GPS will talk to you and tell you where to go, but that should be obvious since a handheld GPS doesn't have a speaker.

I see the post from TillaMurphs in January of 2012 confirming that these are aluminum bronze. Too bad, though, I was going to offer to run it through the mass spec if someone could get their hands on a small sample. Having a chemistry degree comes in handy from time to time....

Ashallond and I stopped in Grainfield, KS last week on our way out to Mingo and found KH0103, a chiseled cross in the historic Grainfield Opera House. The building was built in 1887 and the mark was first described in 1953. The pictures aren't particularly spectacular, but the building was quite impressive and the benchmark was very impressive in it's own way. To keep the thread manageable I'm only posting two photos here, but more are in my log for the mark.

I like that one. I found that on a drive between GA and CO a handful of years back. I wasn't able to get images, as the time I was there was the height of mosquito season, and I really was being eaten alive. Was awful. But I like that iron rod. (I actually DO have a fuzzy picture of it, and always meant to go back..) I keep meaning to go get pictures of that one. I only live a few miles from there and that's about the only benchmark in this area that I don't have pictures of. I've gone by twice, but it was the height of summer both times, it's in a really brushy area, and I'm deathly afraid of snakes..... There are eight markers in the state of Arkansas with similar names and I've been told that this is the last one of these in the wild. EK0855 is destroyed. There's no sign of FH0985. Those two I can speak to myself. There's one of these in the museum at the National Historic Site in Fort Smith. Maybe I should check on the rest of them this summer.

This from a user with seven "finds": "Nearly a year later....I think this one is gone. I searched all over the tree, hill, and Creek area. I read some of the other logs and one said they double wrapped it in a zip lock bag so I was looking for both a log and plastic. Maintenance requested or at least add a hint in case I'm just blind...lol"

Here in Wyoming we can only have 4 letters. Mine is "TFTC" Arthur & Trillian has TFTC in Missouri and I have the same in Arkansas. See photos in this thread

I used to have a cache exactly like that. GC35PVY was a WRT54G router in my office with the SSID set to broadcast the coordinates to the final. The building I was in also housed the university's Greek offices, hence the reference to spray-tanned sorority girls. Unfortunately, I was moved to a different office on campus and my new office is too close to an existing cache to keep it alive.

I haven't come across that before, but I'll throw my (generally useless) opinion into the mix. I look at this in two ways: How would I READ that datasheet, and How would I WRITE that datasheet? If I were reading a datasheet with that wording, I'd be confused. The typical way to write that would be to give a specific place from which the measurement was being made. I wouldn't expect it to say that it was measured from an exact point, but I would expect at least a general structure (a corner or something). If I were reading it and it didn't say exactly where it was measured from, I'd automatically assume they meant the exact center of the bridge. For some reason, my mind would automatically treat the bridge as a single object and would reduce it down to a point mass located at the center of the object. I'm overly analytical like that. If I were writing the datasheet, there's no way in the world I would write it the way it's written. When taking measurements in the field I always try to measure from the objects in the area that I expect to be the most permanent. I always go with the corners of buildings, a rail of a railroad track (measured perpindicularly from the track), sometimes trees, sometimes telephone poles, occasionally I'll use the center of a road. I never use the edge of a road for any measurement, though I've certainly seen plenty of datasheets that do use them. For my money, they change too much over time. That's my two cents.

If you're looking to stay local, there are about 70 challenge caches in Arkansas. Ashallond maintains a list that you can find here.

How many caches you can get and how many DeLorme grids you can get are two different questions. Since I've completed the state parks challenge, DeLorme challenge, and counties challenge in Arkansas (and did all three at the same time) I can tell you what I did. You can check my stats for more info, but on a two day road trip here's what I did in Arkansas: 6/10/2011 I got 20 caches in 11 counties and in 9 DeLorme grids. 6/11/2011 I got 17 caches in 13 counties and in 7 DeLorme grids. It's only 37 caches in two days so it doesn't seem like anything.......but it covered 24 of the 75 counties, 14 of 52 state parks for the state park challenge, 16 of 43 DeLorme grids, and we hit the oldest cache in the state along the way. Plus we started the first day by driving 150 miles without a single cache because everyone in the group already had all the counties/parks/DeLorme grids along the way. It's not necessarily a question of MAXIMIZING the number of caches you get on a trip like this. I'd argue that it's more about MINIMIZING the number of caches while MAXIMIZING the number of grids or counties or parks or whatever it is that you're working on. That way you can cover more ground in less time. If you just want numbers, do the Hillbilly Highway, the Americana Run on Highway 70, the Highway 1 trail, or the Delta Heritage Trail. There are plenty of ways to get numbers faster than doing the DeLorme grids. Make sure you double check the rules for the DeLorme and counties challenges. One of them specifies that you can't use Virtual caches (I forget which one). I had to make a second trip out to fix that little mistake.

Here's another thread with a link I provided to a spreadsheet listing all of the benchmarks associated with airway beacons in the western half of the country. I forgot what search string I used to find that, but the same person who created it also has another sheet listing the eastern half of the country.

I would also be more than happy to volunteer some time to try to fix this problem as well. I really don't think it would be that hard to do. I can come up with a few ways that this could be done, but I'm not a code guy, so I don't know if my ideas would be practical or not. Even if a handful of us were simply given the ability to delete logs that are quite obviously bogus it would help. I'm talking about logs posted by people who live in a different country and who have quite obviously never been anywhere near the mark, or logs with photos clearly showing the wrong mark. If we kept the criteria simple and automatically leave any questionable logs alone, we err far on the side of caution, it shouldn't be that difficult to clean things up.

I know that they did exist, and it's my understanding that some of them still exist out west. You can find a list of the markers in the western US here. Note that this isn't my list and I take no responsibility and claim no credit for it. I was aware of ten in my state of Arkansas simply from looking through my benchmarks database. I got bored once and looked them all up on google earth and they all seem to be gone. I didn't see any towers, arrows, or even buildings. From the descriptions I got, they all included the arrow, the light, and the generator house. EJ1855 is the only one of those that looks like it might still be easy to spot the remains of. Take at look at 36.188049, -96.000306 on google earth. That's a point due west of the Tulsa Airport. You can clearly see the word TULSA and an arrow pointing due east. According to the one source I've seen (below), this is a recreation of the arrow used to mark the airport for a visit from Charles Lindbergh back in the 20's. There are no caches in the area at this time, but benchmark GH0942 is nearby. That place has been on my wish list for a while, but I'm always in a hurry when I'm in Tulsa. I may need to plan a trip over just to visit this spot and grab the oldest cache in Oklahoma....

I already sent Jayme a reply and my log and photo have already been reinstated. I've been hunting for benchmarks for about two years now, not long, I realize, but this is the first time I've heard of anything like this in the forum. I've seen plenty of people griping about bogus logs, but this is the first time I've seen any action on the subject. The funny thing is, they deleted a massive chunk of logs, and they still missed a huge number of bogus finds just because they're written in English. Go to the page and do a search for the word "virtual" and you'll see what I mean. If I were going to guess, I'd say that at least 80% of the logs since November of 2005 are suspect. Anyway. It was the end of a very long day and it left me fairly irritated. I just wondered if anyone had heard of anything like this before.

There's a benchmark near here (FH0141) that receives numerous bogus logs. People here have complained about it for as long as I've been caching. I invite you to visit the page for that benchmark and scroll down to 2010. All logs from 1/2009 to 6/2011 have been deleted. That's right, they deleted two and a half years worth of logs. Unfortunately, mine was one of them. Not only have I visited that mark, I included photos to prove it. I pride myself on only logging benchmarks that I have visited and included photos of the mark. The only exception I make to that is if I'm with someone else who is doing the same thing. I don't see a reason to upload multiple photos of the same mark on the same day. If this is somebody's idea of how to fix this problem, I for one am seriously unimpressed. Here's the e-mail I received from Groundspeak a few minutes ago: "Hello Geocacher! Greetings from Geocaching HQ. It has recently come to our attention that a Benchmark located in Arkansas has been falsely logged by many members of the geocaching community - including many while at Geocoinfest in Prague. We have deleted all of these find logs on that Benchmark. Logging requirements for Benchmarks fall under the same category as Virtual Caches and therefore, "A cacher must visit the location of the virtual cache site to log the cache online." If the physical location is not visited and and the benchmark/virtual is digitally logged, this is against the Geocaching Guidelines and is known as "couch logging". Here is a reminder of how the game is played, from the Geocaching Knowledge Books: To get your smiley, it is as important to log your find physically by signing the log book as it is to create your digital log. In the physical log, it is acceptable to use your user name, team name, stamp, or sticker which includes your user name. If the Geocache does not have a physical logbook (Virtual, Benchmark, Webcam, EarthCache) you must physically visit the listed coordinates and meet any other requirements stated in the Geocache description. If you digitally log a Geocache without meeting these requirements (also known as couch logging), your log can be deleted by either the geocache owner or Geocaching HQ without notice. We appreciate your excitement for the game and the Challenge Cache that required many (maybe too many?) icons in a day. But this is not the correct way to go about earning your required icons and robs you of the experience that finding a Benchmark brings. Geocaches and Benchmarks are placed for the community to physically visit and have a unique experience. This cannot happen when a geocache is logged from a photo. Please refrain from this behavior in the future, as this is not in the spirit of the game and violates the Guidelines. Thank you for being an active, passionate member of the geocaching community. Jayme Hewitt Community Support Specialist"

Nice choice of plates Arthur and Trillian! Nice choice of username, too! I present to you TB4WT2W.

That sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to pick it up. Thanks!!

If you have an Android based phone, the app GeoCache Calculator does this quite well. If you stick with the MapSource route, which I have used myself many times, I usually just read the coordinates off the bottom of the screen. Select the cursor pointer tool from the toolbar up top, point the cursor in the middle of your triangle and call that an average, then read the coords and you're on your way.