ecanderson

Per briansnat, "I'll also point out that state parks and non profits with entry fees are exempt from the commercial guideline." I'm now requesting a pointer to something that makes that case. If true, however, the "state parks" waiver you point out (wherever it is) isn't the whole story.

Looking for documentation to that effect. Can you point me in the right direction?

Brings me back to a question I asked earlier. gc has already made assumptions about placement at non-profits to the extent that they have waived the "fee" restriction. So I pay a fee to get into a non-profit's facility. Wouldn't gc also anticipate that the vast majority of non-profit operations look forward to donations? I'm still wondering if the reviewer can provide examples of non-profit facilities where a fee is charged to enter that would be permissible territory for a cache. If not the local Humane Society, what?

It's a problem with the web hosting service. There's something being appended to the original files being sent by the owner that keeps setting the "red flags". Owner thought he had this licked by automatically resending the requisite files via FTP if he found the variance in the files, hoping to do so before the problem was logged again at Google. Guess his workaround is not working. I'll let him know. In any case, the problem of the stuff after the /HTML is benign, but extremely annoying. Edit: I just checked the source for the page, and his workaround worked (nothing appended) but evidently there must have been for a brief, and Google caught it while it was wrong again. The site is (as of the moment) pristine again. The owner will have to (again) force a rescan by Google. What a PITA.

Am about to do the same thing here. We have a very nice multi at the south end of town, and the owner hasn't been seen or heard from since 2/9/09. The final is missing. Cache was placed 3/9/05. Would be a shame to lose it now.

To add to the above -- as a "tidiness" issue, it's nice when a puzzle posted coordinate isn't sitting on top (or nearly so) of another cache (of any type). Makes it hard to see one or the other on the google-produced gc.com map of caches. For that reason, it's nice when everyone organizes to take a lake and space puzzle posted coordinates such that you can see them all distinctly without overlap. Nice to do if you can make it happen, especially in cache dense areas. Edit: An example of the above can be seen by looking at the area around GCPM0A where a large number of puzzle caches start "in the lake".

The problem as I see it is that by this particular reviewer's standard, it would be pretty well impossible to require someone to enter the building of a non-profit, entry fee or no, without being presumed to be promoting it. If I were in this situation, I'd ask the reviewer for an example of a cache location within the building of any non-profit organization that would pass muster. The GC guidelines clearly anticipated this insofar as they had to deal with the problem of an entry fee. I full well understand the overcautious-reviewer-syndrome. Ours refused to allow me to mention the designer of a city owned public golf course or even the name of the city owned public golf course for a cache I placed overlooking a tee box near one. The cache was nowhere near the clubhouse where you could interact with staff. It wasn't even on course property.

Like traditionals with high difficulty ratings, I will avoid a multi of unknown difficulty until I can commit serious time to it IF the owner doesn't give some clue about the number of stages and distances on the cache page. If I'm going out for a quick lunch cache, I won't tackle caches that will likely require more time than I can reasonably expect to devote to them. In your case, you describe it as a "short" multi. Personally, I can't tell if that's the case since I'm not familiar with the area described on the cache page. But if we're talking about something that's 1/2 mile round trip, it's fair game for a lunch cache. Beyond that, you need to wait for a weekend when people have more time to devote to what could turn out to be longer caches. Geez, the thing was only UP for one weekend before you archived it. I'd have given it another weekend.

While I can't tell much from a sat map of the area, understand that it is entirely possible that "Open Space" is NOT intended to be accessed by the public. Sadly, that describes about 90% of the open space that Boulder County purchases around here. They gate and chain off an awful lot of territory here. Anyway, just because an area is designated "open space", that doesn't mean that the city/county wants people to access it. It's often used to protect a specific patch of land for whatever local wildlife exists, especially near urban areas. So the OP may well be right in their concern, and the CO confused about public access to "open space", or the gates may exist just to keep out the bicycles so paths don't start to be made. Someone needs to establish which case is true by contacting local (Albuquerque?) government to get a clear reading of the status of that piece of ground.

At least for a while, nothing -- IF it's actually Tupperware. There's some pretty cheesy stuff being sold out there -- I won't mention the specific brand, but it sounds "hygienic" and owns 3/4 of the "storage container" shelf space in a WalMart -- that probably wouldn't hold up for a single season. The poor quality stuff is generally more rigid, and prone to cracking. I've seen a fair bit of that around. The worst are those REALLY cheap ones designed to take a sandwich to lunch once or twice and be discarded. Can't imagine why anyone even tries those.

Without backtracking the thread, I don't recall that the OP knew whether or not the physical log had been signed. The OP should not assume that because there's no history of a particular person reading the cache page that the cache wasn't actually found. It could have been a group find. Anyway, I'm still not paperless ... pretty much where you were in pre-Colorado days. And while I spend time checking out my planned searches before taking off, there is ALWAYS a chance (especially around here) of another cache popping up that I hadn't noticed during the initial research. Have you never hit the "Find Next" and discovered one you didn't have in your plan? In those events, it's pretty much "by the coordinates". If it is a traditional, I'll take a crack at it ON THE ASSUMPTION that it's a proper traditional. All I know is relative size/difficulty/terrain from the GPX data I've got. I don't want to find out that a traditional requires additional information to find when I'm already on site. That's a "?" cache.

My post didn't have to do with the "rally" mentioned by the OP ... it was just an example of similar situations that occur out here and are very definitely "non-rally".

FYI - the page owner has HIS head screwed on straight about this -- the problem is the junk being appended by the hosting site. Owner now has a mechanism in place that should replace the goofed up page(s) with clean one(s) when they're detected. If quick enough, this should prevent future warnings.

Fixed early this morning (2am) but not propagated as an OK page yet. Takes some time before the warning mechanism stops reporting it.

Using GC1J7FV as your center point, take a look out here. These are long strings of caches placed on the dirt roads out east of Denver International. 99% of them are plastic 35mm film cans set on either fiber cable markers or something similar, all down the road. These weren't place for a game, either. I think the contest was between those placing the caches to see how many they could throw down in a day or something. No fun at all to find, but good for boosting the numbers, I guess.

Some plastics, nylon and polypropylene as examples, are really hard to deal with. If you're running into problems, I'd almost bet you've got a polypropylene container. The second thing that can hurt you is the surface texture of the magnet itself. Some are extremely well polished, making adhesion to those a bit of a bugger, too. Your third problem will be outdoor use where the plastic and magnet will exhibit very different coefficients of expansion with temperature changes. This will very often cause the any brittle adhesive to crack at the junction. 2 part epoxy will often fail in outdoor use for that reason alone. As an example ... I can't tell you how many times I've come up to a "silver bullet" cache and found it on the ground with the magnet separated from the mini-bison to which it was attached. Brittle adhesive on a polished surface is a double whammy! My suggestion would be to try a stronger than usual magnet on the inside as suggested by many above. Rough up the inside of the container surface where the magnet will rest, and use RTV (silicone seal) material liberally on TOP of the magnet and around its outside edges. Use very LITTLE of it under the magnet itself. The spacing of a magnet from the surface to which it is expected to "stick" has everything to do with the strength of the hold of the magnet, and it's already going to be holding through the thickness of the plastic container you are using. Trying to set your magnet on top of 1/8" of goo is going to space it quite far from the object you're parking your cache on, and the magnetic attraction will be substantially weakened. Be sure to let the RTV cure for a least a full day with the container open, especially if it's a small container. The RTV will remain flexible in temperature shifts, and flexible when the magnet and plastic change size with temperature.

You need to recalibrate the compass after every battery change. That would be a bit too late, although also necessary. For some reason, Garmin's design of the mag compass is heavily dependent upon the battery voltage. I find it necessary to recalibrate not only when installing fresh batteries, but once or twice as I burn them down as well. Typically, I'll recal when I see the first bar disappear from the battery indicator, then again as the second disappears if I haven't changed them already. I wish they'd come up with an internal regulator for the compass to prevent its accuracy from being so voltage variable. DC/DC regulation has become pretty efficient over the years.

Now that you've seen for yourself what the results can be, you've answered your own question! When I place a cache, I have WAAS enabled, let the GPSr settle, and use the "averaging" method on the "Mark" feature to assure that I'm getting a stable reading. In a tough environment, I've waited for 50 or more points for averaging before deciding "good enough" and establishing the coordinates for the cache. All of this WAAS discussion is moot of the owner doesn't provide the best coordinates possible. WAAS only helps you get to where the CO says the cache was located, not where it is!

Ditto on both counts. Understanding what WAAS is designed to accomplish, it seems silly not to take advantage of the extra edge in accuracy when it's available. During the week, I cache with a friend with a 60cx. For some reason, he wound up with WAAS disabled, and it was a surprise to me, even knowing how it works, just how much better I was doing with location. He started to wonder about his 60 until he found the feature disabled and got it re-enabled again. As for the mag compass... it's a matter of technique. It's useless when you're practically standing on the cache. It's also useless when the CO produces less than optimal coordinates. But if the coordinates are good, and you're trying to find a cache in the clutter, backing away 30' or 40' and triangulating on a cache is fantastic. This feature also works particularly well when you're up against a cliff wall, bridge, building, etc.. You can back away from the wall and improve the satellite count / accuracy, then take an eyeball on the direction the compass points to get a better sense of the target. I'll take 8' or 12' accuracy and the compass from 30' away over 60' accuracy against a wall any day! It surprises me that cachers that have that feature on their GPSr often don't use it. It was a MUST HAVE when I purchased my old Summit HCx. I'll grant that both of these features do eat into battery life faster than if they are disabled. I'd rather carry a spare pair of batteries than do without either of them.

We have a whole host of caches up in the Estes Park area. The Stanley Hotel was featured in the Jack Nicholson film "The Shining" (1980). An old virtual (GC746) and a traditional (GC1E8EY) both overlook the hotel from the rear of the property. Given the terrain, there are several others with good views of the property, but those two are the close ones.

I've run across another cacher or caching group about a dozen times out of 1870+ finds. Not a high number given the cache and cacher density we have around here. But some of the meetings have proved particularly memorable. Saw a couple with kids at an EOTR on a frontage road off a nearby highway a few months back and HAD to stop. Why else would anyone stop there if not to grab the cache? Sure enough. Was walking across the EOTR Jersey barrier to meet them, and the husband set his hand down right where my next full weight step was going to be. Took the slide instead of the hand and wound up with a pretty nifty sprained ankle that lasted a couple of weeks. Certainly stopped my caching day before it strated! At least we got to talk and they made the find before dispensing an ibuprofen liqu-gel cap. Great folks and relatively new to the game. Another couple were parked w/kids along the side of a road where I maintain a pretty active bug/coin hotel. HAD to pull up behind and say hello. Fortunately, they noted that I was about to embark on a long interstate drive with a cut tire. Good thing I stopped and met them! Rolled home slowly and grabbed the other car until I could get the tire dealt with. This group travels down into the north Denver area regularly from Wyoming just to keep the itch scratched.

Not sure why. Even cachers can be complete idiots behind the wheel -- especially when in too much of a hurry to bag another FTF!

I've had some gripes with placing caches out here in the Denver area, but something good I've noticed is that our two reviewers tend to stay on top of disabled caches. If they hang fire for too long, they'll get archived. "Too" obviously has variability, no doubt including email exchanges with owners, but they don't sit around forever here as they can do in some places.

To get to the other hide. Oh. My. Ouch. Minus THREE points for Singletree!

Cataluña is one of the very few foreign "states" that I have in my caching stats. It's a wonderful place to visit. That mountain (I had to save it in the quote!) looks so much like our part of Colorado. We have caches here in some difficult places, too, and it has sometimes been the information about a cache that shows me the way to reach a place I thought impossible. You are lucky to live in a place that begs for pictures like that to be taken. Enjoy your caching experience there. I won't have time to visit your mountain when I return to Barcelona in November, but I'll remember it now and wish that I could! I hope that you can come out and visit our mountains sometime. This is a view west from near my home: