Team Perks

A "rich, dynamic social hub"? What's the point? I use this site to find caches. It works just fine for me. I don't need (or want) it to be like Myspace or Flickr. That's what I use Myspace and Flickr for.

My interpretation of "adequate permission" is that you should ask, when you need to ask. That is, if your local parks department has a written policy requiring permission, then you get permission. If they don't, then I see no need to ask beforehand, so long as the activity is carried out in an area that is open to unrestricted public use. If you ask them if it's OK to hide a cache, and they don't have a written policy, it will quite likely lead to confusion, red tape, and delays.

I'm currently at exactly 38 to 1. I don't try to keep to any ratio; I hide at my own pace, when I feel I've found areas worthy of hiding a cache. After 3600 finds, a lofty goal like a 10:1 ratio becomes entirely unmanageable.

That doesn't seem to make any sense. You've hidden 4.5 and 5 star difficulty caches. It seems like you enjoy providing a challenge, too. I hope I get to do some of yours so I can see what you mean though. I don't think wanting people to find a 4-star cache is contradiction. When I hide a difficult cache, I want people to enjoy the success of finding it. That doesn't necessarily mean I have to make it easy...I know I get a much greater thrill out of finding a really clever cache than finding a really easy cache, and I'm sure most other cachers would feel the same. I also know it's frustrating to search and fail. Why would I want to enjoy knowing that others went through that experience?

Let's see: I've come across summit registers, bongs, someone's spare key in a fake rock, several letterboxes, a rotting pig corpse, a stolen laptop, a baggie full of poop, and a couple getting busy. Good times. As for my favorite surprise find...While looking for an ammo can hide at the ruins of a dam that collapsed in the 1920s, I came across a different ammo can that was hidden as part of a high school history project; inside it was a whole bunch of papers documenting the history of the dam. It was pretty neat.

I hide them so that they can be found...even my difficult ones. I see no sense in feeling smug when someone can't find my cache.

Gee, and I was already going to post that I always tend to agree with Kealia! I honestly haven't given much conscious thought to whether I tend to agree with particular people. I can think offhand of a number of people whose opinions always seem to be well thought out, even if I don't agree with them. But that's not the point of this thread, so I'm not going to flatter those people by naming them.

The new earthcache guidelines are indeed quite a learning experience for me. For example, after trying to understand a few of TerryDad2's earthcache descriptions, I concluded I'm simply not cut out to ever understand geology.

It is no surprise a jerk like you would try to steal my ideas and claim them as his own.

I think we should change the name of the "DNF task force" to simply "the geocaching community." If enough people can't find it and the owner doesn't take action, then members of the "geocaching community" can log an SBA on the cache listing and alert the volunteer reviewers. It's such a great idea I can't believe nobody's thought of this before!

I agree with the recent posts that you shouldn't simply change your DNF log to a found log. As an owner, your DNF log may prompt me to go check on my cache. Because you didn't create a new log to let me know that you found it, I don't get notified, so I won't know that you went back and it turned out everything was okay, that you couldn't believe you overlooked that spot the first time you were there. If that particular cache is 30 miles from my home on a mountain, I might waste 60 miles driving and an hour hiking to a investigate a potentially missing cache that, it turns out, was there all along. That would annoy me more than a little!

I think I can vouch that I've found my share of lamppost caches. Sometimes several in the same Target parking lot (whee!). And when I do become bored of them again (as I certainly have in the past), I am under no obligation to keep looking for them. That's the great part of caching. When I get tired of searching in the city, I can decide to go find some caches along a new hiking trail. Or hop in the Jeep and see if there are any new caches along my favorite 4x4 trails. Or get on the bike and find some caches along the bike path by the beach. The fact that the lamppost hides are still out there does nothing to detract from my ability to seek out and find other types of caches in more scenic locales.

I saw a very large mountain lion at a watering hole after performing cache maintenance. It was well after dark, so I didn't even notice the mountain lion until I was within 100 feet of it. Needless to say, I backed away and took a different route back to my car. I've seen/heard many rattlesnakes. I've walked back to my vehicle to discover coyotes lounging in the shade underneath it. Most unusual (to me), I once had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting a flock of wild turkeys that were wandering along the highway. Oh...I've seen a few squirrels too.

Really, it's all about perspective and attitude. Cities tend to be fairly densely populated with caches; that's a given. People tend to hide caches near where they live, and well, most people live in or around cities. Being a diverse group of people, there are going to be a diverse group of caches. And more saturated areas are, by definition, going to have more lame caches (numerically, at least) than less saturated areas. While the percentage of "good" vs. "bad" caches might not be different between an area that has 100 caches and one that has 1000 caches, having to weed out the percentage of caches that are dull to find those that are interesting. To be honest, I don't particularly mind the lamppost hides. At least they're easy. There have been many times where, after getting DNF after DNF after DNF, I've been thrilled to pull into a parking lot and see my GPS point straight toward that lamppost. After a series of stunning defeats, even a cheesy 1/1 outside the local supermarket can help get my spirits back up. When I first started caching, I had just moved to a new town. Finding the lame urban/suburban/whatever hides really helped me figure out how to get around. I even stumbled across some great shops and restaurants in my travels. Were most of the caches I found what I would consider to be highly inspired? No. Am I glad I went out and looked for them anyway? You bet. Did I learn something new and unique about my hometown as I went out searching? Absolutely. Don't like the lame urban hides? There are still ways to make them fun. I generally don't cache close to my current home because 1) my experience has been that the caches aren't that interesting and 2) I know the area well and I rarely discover something new. But occasionally I'll get a couple of fellow caching friends together and we'll make a day of trying to get a bunch of them. To face and embrace the lameness, if you will. Perhaps we'll grab dinner and beers afterwards and have fun trying to decide which of them was the silliest hide. Even if the caches aren't all that interesting, I can truthfully admit that I had fun.

My apologies if this question has been raised before...the Search function wasn't as helpful as I had hoped it would be today. I've taken some rather long road trips over the past few months, and created a bookmark for each of them. After my trips were done, I wanted to get rid of the bookmark. Here's where it got annoying. The bookmarks had somewhere in the range of 300 caches apiece, and the only way to archive a bookmark is to delete all the caches. So I had to go through and bulk delete delete the 20 caches on each page of the listing, then confirm that I really wanted to delete them all, and then proceed to do the same thing on the next page of 20 caches. When I was trying to do this a couple days ago, the server was in one of its slow spells again, which made it particularly aggravating. Why isn't there a function where I can just get rid of the bookmark entirely without having to spend my time bulk deleting, confirming, bulk deleting, confirming, and so on, over and over? It seems a rather waste of bandwidth and--of course--my time having to go through this process repeatedly to clear out all of the caches in a bookmark. Any chance it might be possible to change this? (edit for clarity)

I've come across a couple caches like that before. They still rank among some of my most favorite surprises while out caching, and I don't recall seeing anyone leaving negative logs on the cage pages. As long as the cache isn't someplace likely to draw undue attention, I say go for it.

I know at least two cachers who've had the police pull guns on them. I've been harshly threatened by the fuzz while caching, but have yet to find myself staring down the barrel of a gun. Considering my tendency to be sarcastic in inappropriate situations and my general dislike of authority figures, it's probably only a matter of time til that happens...

I came across a cache by accident a couple months ago when I pulled off a highway to look at an old building & read a historical marker. I had just finished saying something like "Gee, this would be a neat spot for a cache" when I looked down and sure enough, there was one about two feet away from me.

I have no problem uploading my photos at 800x600 quality. I generally pull them from my Flickr account (which automatically resizes during upload and does a pretty good job at avoiding compression/resizing-related quality problems) and upload them to my GC.com gallery. They typically hit between 90-110K in size so they display just fine.

This cache has 1415 logs, all but a few of which are finds. My most-found cache has 151 finds since June '05, with a couple-month period during which the cache was disabled. (edit for clarity)

It seems rather ironic that Groundspeak would be so worried about external websites becoming unavailable when GC.com seems to be unavailable half the time...

That's why I cache under a "Team" name. That way it especially doesn't matter who finds it.

I forgot to mention that my ceremony was held about 100 feet from a virtual. And no, I didn't bring the GPS as I walked down the aisle...but ONLY because I'd already logged it.

Our honeymoon was only a week long. I apparently found a VERY understanding woman. (edit: spelleeng)

Eh, amateurs. I found 110 caches while on my honeymoon.