cmpalmer

My first LED flashlight (a Brinkman from Wal-Mart) was quite blue, but I've noticed that the "white" LEDs are getting much better. I haven't bought a full-sized LED replacement yet, but the last one I tried had much whiter light. Once, on a night hike on one of my kid's field trips, I was using the Brinkman and one of the mom's actually got mad at me because she said those halogen lights gave her a headache and hurt her eyes. I tried to explain that it was an LED and not a halogen car headlight and she got even more ticked off and asked me to turn it off or keep it away from her. Sheesh. I'm looking for an LED lamp for my bike. Does anyone have any experience in using a headlamp (as in one of those lights that strap to your head) while biking? Is that reasonable?

My kids and I set off to hike up a power line trail to a local cache. The first thing we found was a deer that had got hung up in a iron fence and died. Nice start, huh? The rest of the hike (after contacting the fence owner) went fine...

This was actually a good hint misused (I was reminded by the "Under a large rock" in a field of rocks). The hint was something like: Directly under the large dead cedar tree growing out of the side of the large rock With a hint like that it should be a piece of cake, right? Not for me. Tree canopy was limiting my GPS accuracy, but I got around 20' away and there was a pile of large rocks with a large dead cedar tree growing right out of the side. My GPS was showing 35' accuracy, so I set to work. 30 minutes later, after crawling under the rock, poking the leaves, putting my hand in dark crevices filled with spiders, and finding many interesting forms of life (ticks, mosquitos, millipedes, etc.) I gave up, gathered up my stuff and as I turned to go, saw *another* large dead cedar tree growing out of the side of a large rock about, oh, 20' away just like my GPSr was telling me. Took me about 1 minute to find the cache directly under it. Doh!

I usually leave my GPS set to magnetic north as I rarely use it in conjunction with printed maps. If my math is right, a 10 degree difference at 100' comes out to 17 feet in whichever direction it is off.

I've got a pair of hiking shoes that I think are from L.L. Bean (I can't remember). I like the shoes and they give me great support and good traction on dry ground, loose gravel, etc. I don't do much climbing, just the occasional scramble. However, the other day I was caching in light rain and trying to climb down some rocks and almost slid right off the cliff. On *wet* rocks, the soles were like walking on ice. So my question is, what kind of sole gives the best performance on multiple terrain. I live in North Alabama, so ice and snow aren't common, but gravel, rocks, wet rocks, streams, and mud are. Do I have to get multiple pairs for different terrain, or is there a good all-around type?

I've only done three multi's. My favorite one so far had 8 steps (and math involved) and took me two long lunch breaks to finish. Another had 5 stops and I did it in under and hour. The last only had two, but the first stop was cool -- you drove to a certain location and tuned to a low-power FM station that was broadcasting the coordinates to the cache.

When you are about 1.5 to 2 times as far from the cache as your accuracy, set your GPSr on the ground and let it "settle". For example, if it is showing 20' accuracy, get at least 30'-40' away. Actually, the farther the better, but if it is too far away, it doesn't help you much since you might not have line of sight to the cache area. A little sketching will help you understand that the farther away you are, the more accurate the bearing should be. Try to pick a spot in a clearing if the actual cache area is under heavy tree canopy. Set your GPS to show you the bearing to the waypoint/cache. Turn the dial of your compass to that bearing on the outer ring, then hold the compass perpendicular to your body and turn your *body* until the compass arrow lines up with north (0 degrees). You are now facing the cache. If you sight along the front of the compass and imagine a line, that line should pass very close to the cache. The distance shown on your GPSr tells you how far to go. Learning your stride length will allow you to estimate how far you need to walk. If this doesn't help you find it, try again from a different direction (say 90 degrees away from the first position). If you do it right, the imaginary line from your first position should cross the imaginary line from your second position right on top of the cache.

Walking on a local greenway in Madison, AL I ran across this little guy: He was puttering along, so I thought I would prod him off the trail with a little stick since there were dogs and bicycles frequenting the track. When I reached down with the stick toward his tail, he jumped about 6" in the air, did a 180 degree turn in mid air and snapped at the stick with a loud *crack*. After that, I just took his picture and left him alone -- he can take care of himself...

I like smugmug, too. The price is good, you can hotlink, and you have a lot of organizational flexibility. My Smugmug page

I've got a better one than used golf balls used as trade items: Today I found a really cool new cache. The first stage was a low-power radio transmitter that you had to drive close to and find and listen to the coords for the cache. Really cool. Then the cache itself was next to a nice stream that I didn't know was there. Really cool. There was a trail leading to right beside the cache, so you didn't have to tramp through briars and poison ivy. Really cool. Ammo can cache, so no soggy logs. Really cool. I was second to find it and what was it stocked with? A ziploc bag *full* of used golf-balls. Aaargh. TNLN (I wasn't planning on trading anyway, so I didn't bring any trade swag, but I wished I'd brought some stuff to leave).

Here is a good story for you. THIS IS A REAL JOB A friend of mine graduated with a degree in biology and his first job after college was doing an environmental impact study on pesticide use. This sounds interesting, huh? His job was to put on heavy clothing and waders and walk around in Florida woods and swamps (oh, excuse me, wetland areas) with a GPS and a clipboard and *count dead animals*. So I figure my cover story would be, "I am doing an environmental impact study -- seen any dead things?"

I've not seen it happen personally, but it is generally considered to be the same as leaving food, i.e., don't do it.

One other piece of advice on using a magnetic compass with your GPS. Remember that the margin of error in the GPS also affects the compass bearing. So if your GPS is reading 25' accuracy and the distance to your waypoint is reading 15', you cannot trust the bearing. What I suggest is going out in a clear direction about 2-3x (or more) of the accuracy, so if it reads 25', go 50-100' away then set the GPSr down on the ground or on a rock with a clear view of the sky and step away from it for a few minutes (to reduce the chance of your body influencing the signal. Then, read the bearing off the GPSr and transfer that bearing to the rotating dial on your compass, hold it in front of you and turn your body (not the compass) until the arrow lines up with the N. You should now be facing directly toward where the cache is hid, so look for good spots before walking toward it. If there are lots of good hiding places along the line, you might want to take another reading from 90 degrees away and triangulate on the spot.

Souvenirs. One thing I've done is go to local souvenir shops, like museum stores and stuff. I had never looked at local souvenirs, because, you know, I live here But many cachers are from out of town, so a local souvenir might be nice and they make even better trade swag when you are caching out of town. Magnets, pens, buttons, patches, toys, medals, pins, etc.

The best thing about this log is the log below it from TheBull, Toron's caching partner, which says, in essence, "Had a bit of a hard time finding it. Great cache!"

We're going in two weeks and we'll be staying on the Disney property. Is there *any* chance that Disney security will give me problems about having my GPSr with me when I enter the park? It'll be in a bag with my camera and stuff, which I assume they will be searching. Do they have a stated policy of "acceptible devices"?

Sometimes I think about selling it, and sometimes I think about getting it repadded and recorked and playing it some. I suppose I'll wait and see if my son wants to be in the band. It's not like I don't have enough hobbies already!

Wow, I graduated high school 20 years ago this year (and college a few years after that) and, like others have said, I still have the following dreams: I forgot my locker combination I get sent back to high school, but have forgotten my class schedule (our high school has rotating schedules) There is a big test that I haven't studied for (or I have missed all of the classes) I'm back in band class and I haven't touched my saxophone in 6 years. I've only had one or two geocaching dreams -- one was the other night (everyone nod off now*): My boss sent me with a poster for Desperado to get Antonio Banderas's autograph while he was filming a new TV series in a nearby town (note that none of the above makes any sense). I decided that I was going to find two geocaches in that town while I was there, but at the first, I got caught up in a huge riot and at the second, there was a family there having a picnic and the cache was in their picnic cooler. *Everyone I know, including myself, zones out when other people describe their dreams in detail...

I found a newspaper box halfway up the side of a mountain on a power line easement. With the rocks and trees, I couldn't see any way that it could have been tossed from the road and rolled downhill. Either it was a tornado, or someone's idea of a misguided prank ("I know, let's steal a newspaper box, and haul it up the side of the mountain and leave it. Won't that be cool?" "Yeah dude, whatever -- hand me another beer.")

Souvenir stores are good. Try the gift shops from local museums and tourist attractions. I figure they make good swag for out of towner cachers. I got a lot of magnets, hat pins, commemorative coins, and assorted doodads at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center here in Huntsville, AL. I put some in my local hides and I also use them as trade items when caching out of town. Party City or similar stores have some nice cheap items -- some of them are inferior or dollar store merchandise, but some are cool. Here in Huntsville we also have a store called Mike's Merchandise which has cool import and overstock items -- screwdriver kits, small tools, magnets, odd gadgets, toys, etc. (and lots of ammo boxes).

I just got this cache notification. There is a thread on alacache.com about this issue. Someone has talked to the park rangers and they don't seem to have a problem with caching, but this was posted after that discussion. ofcbc's profile identified him/her as a state police officer. This is an automated message from Geocaching.com You are receiving this email because this listing is on your watch list. Visit the web site to change your watchlist settings. ofcbc posted a note for stargazer (Traditional Cache) at 1/23/2004 Log Date: 1/23/2004 this cache is on monte sano state park. it was not authorized and such incidents are to be considered littering. we urge that this cache if found be removed or turned over to monte sano state park's rangers. Visit this listing at the below address: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LU...87-8b081e503a2e Visit GC4B58 http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...9d-6f79b34af42e Profile for ofcbc: http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=c8...68-0c9aef941b64

quote:Originally posted by team travel pig:i'm afraid i probably would have handed mine over too... glad you got it back again. and while i agree it's dumb, mohammed atta did in fact buy a gps unit while in new york to map the tower location. I can go to TerraServer, or quite a few other sites that have online aerial photos and topo maps, from the comfort of my desk and get a very accurate lat/long of any site in the US -- the capital building, the Empire state building, or the Scream Machine at Six Flags in Georgia. Why would anyone think that a GPS is a magical terrorist weapon compare to the information that is available through other means? -- stream of did I lock the front door? consciousness

I found a nicely laminated card inviting the find to a local meeting of a gay and lesbian society once. Thought it was kind of strange to leave it in a cache, but I didn't take it or trash it out. To each their own. I have found cross necklaces and other religious items in caches. I figure lots of cachers might be happy to trade for them, no harm done. I wouldn't like people trading nice items for Jack Chick tracts, though (amusing as they are, I can't see it as "trading up" -- my kids have been happy to find a dirty golfball before). -- stream of did I lock the front door? consciousness

quote:Originally posted by joefrog: Here's another story, regarding local ammo cans: http://www.nbc13.com/news/2569581/detail.html This is another topic for the "You know you've been geocaching too much" thread: You read about someone in your home state leaving bombs on people's front porches and the first thing you think is, "Crap, he put them in ammo cans -- now my ammo can caches are going to be suspect." The rest of the world is thinking "Oh no, another terrorist/bomber" and we're thinking "Some other spoilsport trying to ruin our hobby" -- stream of did I lock the front door? consciousness

I took my son (9) and his friend (10) caching this weekend while we were on vacation. After walking for a mile down a trail, we saw a sign that said "Gator Lake ->". We looked, and, sure enough, there was an alligator floating around not too far from shore. We thought it was really cool and the highlight of the trip (the cache was nice, too). However, when we got back to the rental house, my wife and the other boy's mom weren't nearly as happy about us running across a gator while caching. Go figure BTW, my grandmother fed a bobcat on her backporch for several months (in North Alabama). It starting coming up when it was small and she thought it was just another stray cat, but it kept getting bigger and bigger. -- stream of did I lock the front door? consciousness