WalruZ

If the guardrail is along a busy street or highway then it's a lame hide in the first place.

The one thing that cachers ALWAYS appreciate and trade for are complete ready-to-hide caches. Various sizes of rubbermaid wrapped in cammo tape with some cheap swag, logbook and small pen make great trade items.

All I can say is Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish, and thank you Ms Jenn & others for archiving this abomination I said it in our local forums and I'll say it here too - anyone who thinks that a 1000 cache power trail has any redeeming features at all is Sick. In. The. Head. Poor cache quality is a SIGNIFICANT problem for Groundspeak. I have met many people over the years who have tried geocaching only to drop it because it was "stupid", and upon further questioning I usually found that their opinion was formed because they went out and found some crappy hide that was thrown down "just to give you a chance at another number." Allowing this very pleasant pastime to be hijacked by a small subset of psychotic obsessive-compulsive lunatics has been and will be a poor business decision by Groundspeak. (Hi Jeremy!) GeoCaching will at best remain a niche activity that people have just sort of heard of, if at all, and at worst totally self-destruct under a tsunami of abuse while the people who really care about it - who OWN it - passively refuse to take any sort of stand. Probably, but I try to think the best about people. The co admitted up-front that they did not look at the emails that the cache generated, nor did they care about their contents.

What I'm saying is that there's nothing, really, preventing someone from more or less automatically creating a geocaching.com account and then systematically spamming every cache they can find with a link to a viagra site. When that happens, it'll be captcha time, like it or not.

Beach Safes

Can't find the portion of the forum for making suggestions to TPTB, so here you go. Cachers I know have recently seen experimental automated logging of caches. The reason isn't entirely clear, but... Sooner or later somebody is going to figure out that it's possible to apply forum spam techniques to cache page logs. When that happens, GS is going to have to CAPTCHA protect the log form, and probably in a hurry. I suggest you guys start now. That's all.

The OP has twice as many posts as he does finds. When will you forum rats get it through your sad little heads that Geocaching is something that you do, not something that you just talk about.

Perhaps you're familiar with the power trail that has been laid in near Area 51 in the Nevada desert. 1000+ caches over 100 miles, one every .1 mile. I was chastised on our local forums for contending that anyone who thought this had any redeeming aspects at all was working with a few screws loose. Perhaps that was a little strong, but yeah - that's how I feel. Really, this has more in common with competitive eating than it does with GeoCaching. --- So, I speak with someone who has just returned from there. Close to 1000 caches in 24 hours. But consider what people are doing... "LeapFrogging" -- A master team is assembled. Three cars with one sub-team each go out. Each car does every 3rd cache and signs in everyone in the master team. "Traveling" -- The 'jumper' grabs the cache and substitutes another similar cache, then runs back to the car. While traveling to the next cache, they sign the whole team into the cache that they 'took'. At the next cache they trade the 'taken' cache for the cache they find, which repeats the process. Lord knows what else. Even if you just do it straight up, stopping every 0.1 miles and signing the cache your own self, what have you really done, and why would you do it? Honestly, why in the world do people want to go do this? Can't you see how crazy it is? How could you explain this to a normal person without having them consider committing you for observation? What has become of us?

On my Legend CX there is a menu screen, and on that menu screen there's an option called "trip computer". Choose that. Then press the menu button (down low on the left) and from the context menu choose "reset". "Delete all waypoints' is unchecked by default, so you'll have to check it or choose "select all". That does what you want.

Attend an event, hook up with your fellow geocachers, and go on some group hunts. You can learn a lot by example.

Yes. Nano's are a plague, and we should not minimize the fact that they are a maintenance nightmare. If people are going to put them out, make them suffer.

For what it's worth, I've found many many caches using a plain old Etrex H, which you can get at wally-world for $85 or so. It does not display a map, but you can deal with that online before you go out.

"Stealth" is something that somebody made up and has lingered around in cache listings ever since. As far as I'm concerned, barring a cache to close to private property, "stealth" is for suckers. That's _your_ rule, not mine.

I'm bumping this because I don't understand unlock at all. I played two WIG caches this weekend. Logged the finds and all. Came to the WIG site and pulled up the cartridge pages. uploaded my saved games to unlock. logged each cartridge. So. Why did I unlock the cartridge? What does that mean? I went to my 'home' page and see a link for my logs, but I don't see any reference to cartridges I unlocked. Did I have to unlock it to log it? Or does it just mean I completed it - and if so, where does a list of my completed cartridges display?

In many ways Waymarking is harder than geocaching. You have to take pictures, gather information and make a well-written description of some thing that you are Waymarking. Visiting is less work but good manners on the site call for some written description of your visit. GeoCachers who just grunt 'TFTC' don't have much to offer to Waymarking, and frankly, we don't miss them.

Go for it. My daughter will be 3 soon and already has over 1000 finds.

In Silicon Valley we go by the "Joanie" rule, which is 15 minutes per level of difficulty. If you're having trouble finding caches, my advice is to go to a local event and tell some of the old timers you would like to 'tag along' on a cache run. Watching experienced cachers search is very educational.

Commercial GPS units will pretty much always give you an epe of at least 15 feet no matter how much sky you can see, which has more to do with the limits that the technology is operating under than anything else. What the newer units can do is give you a good reading in less-than-perfect conditions. An old yellow Garmin will give you as good a position as anything if you're standing out in the middle of a field (where there is unlikely to be a geocache.) Walk it into the treeline or the woods and you'll get significant position degradation from multipath or foliage, and in thick canopy you won't have a position at all. The new yellow Garmin 'H' series will give you excellent position even in the treeline and can give you very good position even under thick canopy. It's what I've been using and I'm very pleased, and only $100.

Hi. So, I'm looking at my my account page, and I'm looking at some recent smilies, and I'm thinking, "those smilies look nice." "I like the way those smilies look." and I realize... I would like a t-shirt with the GS smiley, the one you see next to a found cache listing - this one , about the size of an old silver dollar, offset where the breast pocket would go. The GS smiley is very distinctive, not the same as a "smiley face," and it would be very cool, I would think. Maybe with the words "Found It!" underneath in 1/2 inch letters. Or am I just crazy. How about it Jeremy? Never too early to start thinking about Christmas...

Don't forget to cammo the container with leaves, moss, etc.

The most popular trade item you can put in your cache (short of geocoins) is a few ready-to-hide micro caches. Perhaps even a small, if room allows. Other geocachers trade for these first. They are also inexpensive to make. www.orientaltrading.com is a good source of cheap toys, although you usually have to buy in bulk lots.

Here is an example of a cache that has a large number of intermediate waypoints, in this case, 44, yet is quite easy to maintain. As you can see, the technique is more suitable for an urban/suburban placement.

There's a name you don't see much anymore...

If I plot a cache on google maps (a single cache) I can choose a nice terrain view. The multi-cache map doesn't have this option - it does have topo, but... I want the terrain. It's just a button, right?

Why Not?