[Filtering Out Finders]

I once considered placing a cache in a Men's bathroom in the office building I worked in. I was going to call it For Men Only. Then I learned that GPSrs don't usually work well indoors and I decided that I was really only considering it for the funny value. If, however, a woman had decided to find and log the cache I would have allowed it. (Isn't it nice of me to allow a find for a cache I never placed? )

[House Caches]

I did a house cache that very clearly stated that it could be reached from the sidewalk and that you did not need to go into the yard. I figured that this was because the owner didn't want people walking all over his grass. A few weeks later I happen to go to that same house with a friend who knew the owners and I told them I had found thier geocache. They gave me a big blank look. It turns out they had never heard of geocaching and they had no idea a cache was in their front yard. At least it was a credit to the sneakyness of our local cachers because this was a very popular drive by cache with several finds a day.

[A Couple ?'s From Newbee]

Geocacher University offers this brochure which does an excellent job of explaining hamstercaching to the uninitiated. I keep a supply of these handy in my caching pack.

 

Note to self: Keep brochures in *upper* pack pocket, *above* the hamsters.

 

Thanks.

[A Couple ?'s From Newbee]

I couldn't find a place for this question, so I'll ask it here. Should hamsters be considered food and, therefore, excluded as trade items?

The more I think of it, Hamsters have a sharp end and, therefore, should be excluded just like knives and multi-tools.

These malicious personal attacks perfectly illustrate why you were on my ignore list prior to the recent forums upgrade. If you don't like my signature item, just open the container, move the hamster aside, sign the log, replace the log *gently* under the hamster, and move along to the next cache. (But I do recommend wearing gloves.) There is no need to snipe at me.

 

Okay, I'm a little dense, I don't frequent the forums a lot, and I don't think I cache in your area...do you really leave hamsters? I'm just curious. Is there a joke that I'm not getting? Feel free to e-mail me if I am asking you to let some cat out of the bag by replying in public. I love unique signature items.

[Need Opinion About Potential Location For My First Hide]

We have had a place scoped out for first ever hide. Then we read about a rule that makes us think it may be rejected by the admin but we thought maybe we'd scope out "expert opinion" here.

 

About 1/4 mile down the road from our home is a county park. We know caches are allowed there because other county parks in our county have plenty of them (though this park does not yet). The best hiding place for our ammo box is a woodsy area at the other end of the park from the entrance.

 

Here's the problem:

 

The hide would be near the bottom of a hill that is full of trees. At the top of the hill about 100 ft. up are railroad tracks for our local commuter railroad. The park ends at the railroad and there are houses with a fence at the other side of the hill (also with heavy tree cover between the fence and the train tracks) so we don't think anyone would climb the fence and cross the tracks to seek the cache. It is very obvious from the way the park is designed that you enter, you park, and you walk about 1/4 mile down a trail to the cache. In fact, at the cache you have to look up almost to the sky to see the railroad tracks and the trees mostly block them and trains from view.

 

Technically, this is within 150 ft. of train tracks and would get rejected, but I noticed that the guidelines say it is up to the discretion of the admin. Since these are not "overt" (i.e. the tracks are not right in front of you to cross and heavily visible), would it get rejected? If you are not sure, does it make sense for us to contact the local admin (how do we do this?) before doing the hide?

 

Please let us know, thanks.

 

I wold submit the cache with the same explanation you gave here. That way the approver can decide if you are due for an exception. I know besides safety another reason for not placing near tracks is you don't want it to look like a terrorist bomb. In this case though i don't think it would look that way becuase the tracks are not very visible from the cache. On the other hand I am not an approver so my opinion counts for very little

 

Edit: Holy cow lots of replies while I was typing.

[Stone Wall Caches]

...it is very difficult to then replace the stones in exactly the same way.

I find the case you are making to be quite silly indeed. Is it really a problem that a couple of stones have been shifted in a stone wall out in the middle of the woods that no human being would ever notice? This is hardly a cause for concern and hardly worthy of even a passing thought.

 

Hobbyists (in any hobby) tend to create superfluous, self-defeating "rules and regulations" when they are too deepy entrenched. This is clearly one of them.

Move a stone two inches every day and see how far away it gets from it's original spot. Did you notice that part about this being illegal in some places? I have not seen these stone walls, having never been to New England. I hope, however, that if I ever get out there they won't all be destroyed by someone who doesn't relize how special they are.

[First Day Of Class]

my school's athletic department just bought 10 yellow etrex units

 

I have just recieved 10 yellows too and I will be caching as part of my Outdoor Ed class wil grade 7-9's. There are several staff members here who cache as well. Keep promoting it!

You're school district must be rich. We are lucky to get new 4-Square balls. I'm not complaining, just jealous. I actually started a couple of TBs for some 5th grade classes and they loved it. I would love to see GPSr in the hands of students.

[Tracking Homemade Coins?]

I think there was talk once of selling a TB number without the tag for just this type of purpose. The idea is that it would be cheaper since there would be no tag to create and no shipping since numbers and activation codes could be e-mailed but I don't think the idea ever went anywhere.

[Jeep Recall]

While I may not go 300 miles on an average caching day, it has been known to happen. (my typical caching day is probably about 150km). Yep, I'm not surprised that there are more Jeeps south of the border, and to be honest I'm not really complaining, I'm just saying that you said "They are quite easy to find if you just try" well, they aren't easy to find up here, or even easy to locate up here, and I do go to just about every event that we have up here (although we don't really do travel bug swaps at the events up here).

I don't know how I'd feel about finding a 'bumble bee Jeep', different than finding a Cherokee, but you still didn't answer my question, and I think it is an important one, if someone in a very Jeep poor area had e-mailed you saying they were disapointed about not finding the Jeep attached to the tag, what would you have done?

I would have been surprised. Seemd like every one here liked the idea of the swap and wanted to find it. Too bad it too stalled out and disappeared like the rest.

 

Team Sand Dollar

I think the question is, would you make it right and send them the Yellow Jeep that you took for your own. I love your idea of sending out a White Cherokee to match your own. Too bad you had to deface another travel bug to do it. Why not spring for the few dollars for your own tag and release it that way? It's not the value of the bug or how neat the one you release is its the principle of the matter. You took something that wasn't yours and you kept it and replaced it with something else. That's not what travel bugs are for. I don't care who you talked to unless you had specific permission from JEEP you were wrong. I also don't care if you tried to get permission and JEEP never responded. In a matter such as taking something that doesn't belong to you, silence means leave it alone.

[Posting And You]

In his defense, it looks like the two Markwells are from the Off-topic forum which, I think, can only be accessed by premium members. On the other hand I haven't been here for a while so I could be wrong.

[Things To Not Use]

almost forgot ...

 

GLASS CACHE containers are a bad idea, period. ... accidents happen and cachers RARELY carry extra ammo boxes. ... the same goes for ceramic containers.

Now here is something that I have never seen. Do people really use glass containers for a cache? That would seem to be a disaster waiting to happen.

[Stay Away From This Geocache]

Although I am APPALLED at the actions of this cache organizer. I have to say that the actions advocated by Cachemaniac (an obvious sockpuppet account) on the cache page are equally bad . It may be that others attending this event would welcome "outside cachers" I just hope the cache organizer rethinks his position and realizes that it is inappropriote to exclude anyone.

[Hikers Found Dead]

My guess is that the victims were wearing cotton and the ones who survived were wearing synthetics. Summer's gone, so its time to put your cotton away and pull out your polypropelene underwear and fleece shirts, jackets and pullovers and synthetic pants. Cotton kills

Is cotton always bad in cold weather or just cotton alone without some additional protection? I always thought your underclothes were suppose to be cotton in cold weather but now I can't remember why.

[Microcache]

A micro cache is really really small. Usually from a large micro like a altoids mint tin to a medium like a film canister to the really sinister ones that seem to be the size of a pencil eraser.

[Tb From A Cache It Was Not Logged At]

This is "correct" in that this is how the system is set up. What you can do is log the bug into the cache you got it out of and then log it back out again. This will show that the bug visited that cache and will reflect the mileage it traveled. The problem may have been that the placing cacher was on vacation at the time of the placement and did not have computer access to log the placement for a few days.

[Frequency Of Update Of Pocket Cache]

A pocket query is a specially tailored search for caches on the website that is available to premium and charter members. The pocket query also allows you to have the results e-mailed to you in a couple different formats.

[Only In New Jersey?]

My son in law and I were out doing a cache along a bike path and I happened to look up and commented to him "we have company". A police officer was walking towards us and at the same time I heard a vehicle approaching from the other direction. Here comes not one but two police cruisers.

 

We are surrounded by three officers wanting to know what we were doing. We started to explain and they said they had never heard of such a thing. They asked us to stand over by a tree and proceeded to run our drivers licenses through the computer. More questions about this geocaching thing and then the goody.

 

Seems one of the bike riders called 911 to report suspicious activity. My son in law's father is from India and the caller reported a white guy and an Arab man with electronic equipment doing surveilence (sic) in the park.

 

We got them all calmed down and they actually were laughing about it.

 

Welcome to New Jersey!

I suppose that this is easy for me to say safe in my little computer chair but I'm pretty sure you don't have to produce a driver's licence unless you are actually driving. I beleive that you are required to verbally identify yourself to a police officer but in America we do not have to carry "identity papers". Yet.

[Am I The Only One?]

I don't have a massive amount of finds (89 at press time) so maybe it hasn't hit me yet. If there's a magic find count that turns me into a cache critic, let me know what it is ... I'll stay below it 

 

Anyone with less finds than me is too inexperienced. Anyone with more finds than me has too much spare time and cannot possibly understand the real world. (This goes for forum posts as well)

 

My number of finds is perfect and therefore my opinion is perfect follow follow ME.

 

[Forest Service]

I havnt had any problems recently. All of the forest service people I've talked to latley seemed like they might join.

I'm sorry but I have to ask. Did you realize that this thread was over three years old when You replied

[Quit Bumping Old Threads!]

I have a couple of problems with the subject of this thread.

 

1: Define 'old'.

 

Now it's old.

[Help Save The Great Outdoors!]

Take it from me ... bills and treaties that the President signs are worthless. If I had a scalp for each promise that the President broke to the Indians, you all would have serious headaches.

I once heard a "man on the street" radio broadcastr where they asked "When do you think the government should have started to crack down on illegal aliens?" A gentelman with a native american accent said 1620.

 

I just realized that this is completely off topic sorry I'm done now.

[Retrieving Tb's Dropped In Your Own Cache]

My heavens. I just looked and saw that you even left another TB in place of the Jeep. I have to agree with everyone else that there was no problem with what you did. Most people (I think) don't even consider TBs to be trade items but rather something just to take and move on without a trade. You went above and beyond your obligation. I know I did get frustrated when the same few cachers in my area seemed to get all the Jeeps early on but I just saw it as a challenge to beat them to one which I finally did.

[Afraid My Tb Was Lost To Hurricane Ivan]

E-mailing someone that you see has been on the site is probably a good thing to do. Being tactful is, of course, a big help too. As long as your e-mail sounds like your post I'm sure you'll be fine. IF someone is offended they are probably WAY stressed and you can provide a service by allowing them to blow up at you and relieve some of that stress

[Tb For A School Class]

IF you check out my profile you will see Frutti Tutti, the Hunters, Frutti Tutti jr. and Wandering Wanda all released through me by classes at Timpanogos Academy. The first two did very well and the other two never moved very much. You just never know. Sorry I don't know how to post a link. I use a computer but I am not very fancy with it.

 

By the way I see that you are in Ontario, Canada. I lived for about 3 months in Sault Ste Marie. It was beautiful up there and I can still remember (after 15 years) some great places that I would have loved to place a cache.

 

Edit to talk about Canada.

[My Cache]

This is easier to say than to do but put some travel bugs in it especially if you can get a Yellow Jeep. You could also put in a cool 1st finder prize (lots of cash maybe)