BlueMoth

I have just finished saving all 900 of my and my caching partner's logs and over 3,000 photos from benchmarks I/we found. It is still not sorted. That will take another month. If someone had not alerted me on Oct 30th that benchmarks were being scrapped from the geocaching website, I would have woken up one morning to find out too late to save anything. What was the thinking behind this long slothful slouch to the hurried end? It is unfathomable. And how could GS announce it right before the holidays when most of us are busy with family matters. Were they hoping no one would notice or care? I believe minimal community input actually was the goal of this abrupt announcement. If that is true, it succeeded. And how many unaware are going to wake up one morning to find nothing left but their find count? I sent as many pms to people I thought would want to know. But I shouldn't have had to do that. A mass email to the community should have been sent. A simple six month courtesy notice would have gone a long way to mitigate the fury I have been feeling this past month. As I progressed in my task of saving all my finds over the last weeks, not knowing if this day would be the last one I had to save anything, I thought a lot about this purge and came to the realization that for many years now, GS has given up being the stewards of the game and appointed itself its driver instead. My friend said in an earlier post on this thread that his friend was always saying that GS is constantly taking away things we want and giving us things we don't want and never asked for. That friend he was talking about is me. I've been saying that for 7 yrs, and I'll say this now, that attitude is going to be the eventual death of geocaching because GS is so focused on being the driver they forgot how to be the steward. What GS can't see is that in their attempt to attract the inattentive newbie gadfly with all the shiny objects they dangle out there they keep driving away their longtime paying customers because they are doing it at the expense of things that are useful, needful and enjoyable to us as committed paying geocachers. Some people on this thread have said they have had enough and will not be renewing their pmo. Can GS afford this continuing trend? What will be the next thing to go? Benchmark hunters are angry and disappointed now. Who will GS anger next? Will the gadflies pony up the $30 a year for their few days or six months of a lark? No, most of them will be on to whatever next catches their attention. And here we are. With another soon to be announced trinket for the gadflies. As to ease of use/logging finds and benchmarking apps, there have been in the past, and are also current Groundspeak supported benchmark hunting apps for both iPhones and android that link the USGS data base to Geocaching.com so you can find benchmarks and log your finds directly onto the Geocaching.com website in the field. I suppose the developers pay GS a fee for that link. Now it will soon be gone. I do not know what will happen to these apps in the future. What if GS had developed one of their own? What if. What if... Benchmark hunting is the mother of both virtual caches and adventure labs. What a shame it was never recognized and promoted as such. Think of all the swag, T-shirts, coins, pins, tags etc GS could have sold in their store and profited off of and earmarked for the update of the benchmark data base. Because we all know money is the bottom line for decisions like this. So, as GS sits in its lofty ivory tower in the shadow of the Space Needle, one of the most iconic benchmarks on the planet, and of which you can find a plethora of reproductions at any tourist shop in Seattle, I hope they reflect on the wasted opportunity they always had in their hand.

Wow HQ, way to thoroughly raze to the ground a fun, educational, historical and thrilling adjunct to my geocaching toolbox. Mark all of us benchmark hunters as destroyed. I am sure you have been planning this for a very long time, and no one thought to give us a year's or even six months warning. All that precious data, logs, photos and forum discussions mark destroyed as well. I feel blindsided. I see benchmarking is considered a dinosaur relic, never a thought to add survey marker data bases from other countries or update. No thought to give fair warning of the coming debacle and ask the community for $$ or ideas on how to fund, promote and maintain the database. We are now expected to skip over to that garbled Waymarking site? No. Thank you. And here we are another foot down into the watery vanilla pudding of roll your window down grabs because we all must have the attention span of gnats. I was amused at some of the excuses given for axing benchmarking though. My favorites were there is no owner maintenance and someone might not find a benchmark that was marked destroyed and thus be disappointed. Wipes tears of frustrated laughter away. Keep this up and soon you will have us and this game flatlined into the lowest common denominator of bland.

About a mile and a half past GC16 in the Molalla river corridor is a cache called Blood Lust https://coord.info/GC18VPC that takes you to the body dump site of the Molalla Forest serial killer. I was really glad I didn't do that one alone.

Please give us Back the ability to edit a bookmark Before we add it to a list. We used to be able to do that. It was a most iseful one step tool. Now it is at least 3 steps to edit a bookmark. It is maddening if you have a large list and have to paw through pages to find the cache you want to edit. Please give us the ability to do it in one step again.

1: Any non pmo can log a find if they have found the cache and signed the log. This is not a problem and never has been. 2: One way to do it is go to geocachingadmin.com and type in the gc#. They cannot see the cache page, but they will be able to log a find.

GC12 - the second oldest active cache - still has the original container (5 gallon bucket) and its original logbook. GC17 also still has its original container (ammo can) and logbook as well.

I see you have cached in the Portland, Oregon area. There are several co's around here that have many gadget caches. 13hache OmNom! mxchris79 Baradam and Amygems each have a couple. Many of OmNom!'s are 3d printed puzzle boxes, though some are strictly gadget things.

I think most of the drama surrounding challenge caches could be fixed in 2 easy steps. 1: REQUIRE the co to demonstrate that they have fulfilled the requirements of the challenge Before the cache is published. No exceptions. That should cut down 90% of frivolous challenge spew and give the reviewers a break (at least around here it would). 2: Give challenge caches their own icon, as a subset of Mystery caches. That way people can filter them out to either ignore or seek out, however they wish. (Yes, we all want that). We don't need to turn challenge caches into virtual wannbes, or take away the physcal cache at the end, or hand out badges, or any of the other things I've seen tossed around as fixes. Challenge caches have ALRs. If you stop by to sign the log before you qualify, you write a NOTE until you qualify, and then you log it as a find when you have met the requirements. Is that really so hard to understand?

When I go on a road trip I also look for virtuals and webcams. Another thing I do is sort an area by favorite points. I usually put way too many on my to do list, but it is better to have more than not enough. You were specifically asking about Challenge caches though. If you have your itinerary, do a radius search of nearest towns along the way for caches with the word Challenge in the title. Make a list of the ones you find interesting/fun. You can usually stop and sign the log and write a note, even if you don't qualify for a find yet.

Please, please let someone know! Thank you! It was working just fine until a day ago. I need that feature back. Like I said, it is a Most useful tool to have.

MartyBartfast, thank you for the tip on using the control F function. It does indeed bring up a little window and will highlight any word that I type in. I still have to scroll through finds, but it is better than nothing. As to project gc, it seems to be nothing more than a glorified stat generator. Useful, but not what I am looking for. I won't pay for it again.

Project gc is worthless for what I want. A wildcard seach returns the names of cache Owners not finds. A keyword search brings me back to Groundspeak and just a list of active caches.

Thank you so much. I will try what you suggested. Since I have paid for project gc, I guess I will try that first. My friend suggested that I upgrade to the paying membership. He loves it. So far I have gotten No benefit from it.

I don't have gsak. I don't inderstand how it works. I find projectgc clunky and hard to use. I paid for the upgrade there, but as far as I can tell there is no way to keyword search there anyway. I have to paw through a list of scripts that may or may not be what I need? Really? I have no idea what gps Bable is either. Yes, i was using the new fearure to find key words in my Found caches. It was returning both archived and unarchived finds. Example, if a challenge cache asks for 15 caches with the word Orange. I could immediately pull up any cache I have found with the word Orange. It was a One Step process! Easy and fast. Why should I have to go to some outside website to find that? Obviously gs has the capability to do it. Why would they give it and then take it away? I feel like someone just snatched away the best Christmas present I ever got. So disappointed.

What happened to the Sneak Peek Advanced Search? A few days ago, it was returning archived cache finds on a keyword search. Now I am only getting active cache finds. I have triple checked the filters, so that is not the issue. Please DON'T tell me Groundspeak is dropping this as an advanced search feature. I LOVE this feature, find it most useful, and was happily using it to build bookmarks for Challenge caches. Can anyone tell me what happened here? Is it just a glitch, or is it gone forever?

I was visiting family in Atlanta last September and the day I left to go home, I made sure I had plenty of time to stop by and find the op's virtual cache. Knowing the answer to the question, and where you have to look to find it, my opinion is that there is No possible way you could see that from a fly over. You probably can't see it from Google Earth either. I haven't seen any spoiler photos on the cache page, so can only surmise people are finding a spoiler photo online. Sad. I don't own a virtual cache, and I've never deleted a log on one of my caches, but if I was the co here, I would delete bogus fly over logs. You don't go stand by the big silver bird, you didn't find the cache.

Humm, well yes. Maybe I will avoid trying to log notes on challenge caches from now on. This is rapidly turning into the theater of the absurd. I came home again tonight after a day of caching to find this note from the slough cache co in my inbox: "Hi--I think that it's possible you mis-keyed in the GC numbers for a different cache that you found, and didn't notice it was posting the note on my cache. (I see it was a note, not a find)." My log was deleted. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Next time, look at your cache page. Edit to add another sorry.

I have no hard feelings towards the op and co of the cache in question. Mistakes can happen. No need to let it sour community relations. I also hope they can find as much amusement in this whole drama as I am starting to. I meant what I said about finding the co's cache though. My friends and I will try for it bank side next summer since we don't own kayaks or canoes. I'm actually looking forward to it.

I am the person who wrote that log, and yes, it was a mistake. So sorry to upset the co. No, I wasn't trying to sneak in a false find. I was using my app, on the run out of the rain back to the car, and meant to log a note (not a find) for this challenge cache across the street from where I was having breakfast: http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC49MAX_the-double-alphanumeric-cache-name-challenge?guid=1ae59bfa-03c6-44b5-8a81-4c295c3fbd25. I suppose the co's cache was next on the nearby queue list for my app. I'm not sure why it popped up as it did, or why I didn't notice it as I was logging it. However, I realized my mistake right away, deleted the found log (before I went home), and logged the challenge cache correctly (before I went home) as a note. I see now that I should have sat in the car, and written out an apology to the co as soon as I deleted the found log. So, I'm sorry again. However, a glance at the cache page would have clued the co in that the log was no longer there, because surely by the time they had gotten the email of my "find", that log was already deleted, by me. If they hadn't looked at the cache page, a friendly note asking if I had made a mistake would have been nice. Instead I got this email today. "We're glad someone logged our cache (Not the B. factory) yesterday, however we would like to confirm that you actually had a boat and traveled the slough to get this one. It is not accessible by foot (unless the water level has suddenly dropped so much), and your log does not indicate any information about your watercraft. In addition, we have a whole chain of caches along this stretch of the slough, so nobody has found just one. They always do the whole chain, from the put-in to the pull-out. Please reply with more details describing where exactly you found it and/or how you managed to get to it. Otherwise we will delete your log." Imagine my dumbfounded surprise in getting that the day after I corrected everything. In the interest of fairness, this was my reply this afternoon: "Hello, You sent me a letter threatening to delete my log on your Coat Factory slough cache: I don't have a found log on that cache. Feel free to delete the nonexistant one though. BlueMoth" Anyway, next summer, when it is really hot and the water is low, I guess I know now that if I ever get my caching friends to go along with me and we find an alternative way into that part of the slough, and ever find just that one cache, and not the rest of them along the way, I'll be sure to take a photo to prove that I was there, and since that would be quite the adventure, I'll make sure my log is really long and descriptive too.

I guess my point is that if I visited that town I would Already be spending money - food, gas, lodging, maybe even trinkets. I would boycott their adventure scheme on general principals. I don't like being led around by the nose.

It's a three business marketing scheme. Buy the maps, the pathtags, the books, the trinkets. Visit the various stores on the adventure map and buy more stuff. Spend money in our town, but only where we want you to. Of course they can't list their "caches" on gc.com. What they don't understand, and obviously the city manager doesn't either, is that if I came to visit your town, I would have caches preloaded in my gps, and would never do something as obvious and silly as this. Why should I be gouged for something I can already do for free? They also claim that their "caches" have no logbook (except the final), and are clearly labeled as belonging to them. Guess they put them out and forgot that part.

Go to Joann's Fabric and look for the stamps made by Melisa and Doug. They are $5.99 there and come in a variety of themes, hearts, cars, etc. About 6-8 small stamps in the box. I would call first to see what they have in stock. Another place to look is craigslist. Just type in rubber stamps or craft stamps.

I have been backlogging some benchmarks I found last summer. Even though I looked up the correct dates I was there by my nearby cache finds, logged the benchmarks with the correct dates, and the photos I took with the correct dates, the logs are showing up right in the middle of my recent finds. So if I am putting a date in for last Sept, the logs are showing up right in the middle of April on the finds page. Anyone know how to fix this? It's making me crazy.

You want to reinstate Virtuals and ensure a Wow factor? Easy. Limit their creation to one per CO per year. That's right, you get One. Want to be more restrictive? Limit their once a year creation to pm's only. Sort of a perk. I am not necessarily advocating the latter, but I think my first suggestion would make people think twice before they put one at their local sewer grate. Or it would probably have to be a pretty stellar sewer grate.

Before you hide anything, I would advise you to go find all of Chirpz caches in and around Battleground and Yacolt. Then head to Vancouver and do some RoseRed multis. Both of these cachers have stellar hides, most with a great historical twist. Then go do all the caches in the pdx/Vancouver area that have favorite points. While you are at that, attend some local events and get to know the community and ask your questions there. Before you hide anything, seek out the best, get inspired and take it on the learning curve of how to be the best yourself.