TeamK-9

On occasion, I've been mistaken by geocachers as a muggle. Basically, I was just sitting next to the cache, prettending to be drawing a bird, and I saw them following the GPS towards me, look up, see me and walk away. Later I introduced myself. One cacher visiting one of my caches was signing the logbook when a man came bushwacking out of the brush just below the cache. Surely only a geocacher would bushwack the three hundred feet to get to this cache. But no, it was just some random guy...

I sent you a couple PMs reguarding those magnets. Anyway, it's really nice looking, and looks really professional, people might even think GPS is a company name or something. But I think people should shy away from calling themselves surveyors. In a lot of states being a surveyor is a state certified position, and calling yourself a surveyor might cause problems. I'm thinking about getting similar magnets that say "GPS Mapping Services."

Once, right after we got our Jeep, we decided to go after a local cache that involved a bit of offroading. The cache involved about three miles into the woods on a completely desserted "township road" that was more of a trail than a road. If we would have broke down or gotten stuck, quite frankly, we would have been screwed because our cell phone was getting no coverage, no one knew where we were, and chances are, no one would come down that trail for month's (later, we found out that just a day after us, another group had come after the cache.) We, in our just barely modified Jeep cherokee made it in and out with no major problems. The team that went in two days later, were driving a Ford Bronco with lots of offroading modifications, that had traveled on trails that we wouldn't even think of putting our Jeep on. Well, needless to say, they had some troubles, and required $500 or more of body work. A more recent cache had my dad climbing across the girters on an old railroad bridge. As much as I wanted to go with him, I was scared stiff. The river looked high, and I'm afraid of heights, and water, and I can just barely swim.

Seeing as that you live in Colorado, I'm assuming your approver is CoAdmin, but I could be wrong. Wait another half week or even a full week, and then drop a kind, and considerate email to your approver. Be sure to include cache name, waypoint name, and even the URL if you really want to be helpful.

I'd start by figuring out who's tried the cache the most, and/or logged the most DNFs. You should email them, giving them little hints, trying to encourage them towards the answer. Hopefully, one of them, will catch on and find it. And then you'll know exactly what hints to put on the cache page. But yah, it seems like you've let people struggle long enough. Try and drop some vague hints...

I have to agree with several of the above posters. If you believe the person is missing, hurt, or injured, the absolute worst thing to do would be to have a dozen untrained people scouring the area. Even one or two untrained people can be too much. Any unnecesary people can be ruining a trail, or putting themselves in danger. However, if you're caching with a group, and you realize someone is missing, there are times when a self-sufficient search is more appropriate. A "hasty search" (and yes, that is a technical term) can be done by a small group, before it is deemed that outside help be called in. The simple rules of a hasty search: Don't put anyone else in danger. Stay in groups of two or more. Fan out on all trails from the Point last seen.. Any good books about backcountry hiking should have some information on having a self-sufficient search. But seriously folks. If there's any thought in your mind that the person could be seriously injured or you don't have much clue of their location, call in the professionals...

But you have to realize how hard it really is to set one up. I myself have been working on making my own for several months, and I'm still even looking for a park or public land that's open past dark.

Quite frankly, I don't think there's much of a "market" per se. I mean, there's probably no more than 100-300 true night caches in the world. And I don't really see it being very economical to create a whole new cache type for something there's so few of. I have to say that they ARE really fun though...

We use ours for when the team needs to split up. Being a canine caching team, we generally have two of us and the dog. Occasionally, we'll find ourselves at the bottom of a steep hill that a dog could not safely navigate. I usually do the bushwacking, while my dad keeps the dog, and tries to find another route down. They've come in quite handy during situations like that.

I've read here before that a couple people like to carry bottles of water with yellow food dye with them when they want to cache. When they find the cache, they pour a little of the "solution" into the snow. Quite honestly, this would scare me away from that spot the first couple times, but I think people would catch on eventually...

Sorry, didn't mean to come off harsh or anything. I'm one of the nice guys. Anyway, I understand that the search feature is a pain in the butt to use effectively, but I find that I can usually find stuff if I rephrase the search terms a couple times.

Then my idea would be to post the cordinates for six different interesting places in your town. At each place a person would need to get a specific number, which could be obtained by counting benches, reading a sign or just some other similar random thing. Each place would be like a different number for example, you'd have six stages like this: "Go to (coordinates) and look for the historical marker about the building, take the year of it being built. The third digit of that year is A." Stuff like that. Then, for you're next stage, it would be like "Once you have visited all the rest of the stages, put the numbers into these coordinates: N40 35.ABC W79 24.DEF" You could make those coordinates lead to a micro, with the micro having the coordinates for the final cache which could be an ammo can.

One popularly used thing is throwing in a bit of math for a puzzle stage. On my most recent cache. I had people first go to a historical fort, there, they had to get two numbers off a historical marker. They had to put those numbers into a algebraic equation, to get the next set of coordinates. That is one popular way to make a virtual stage for a multi-cache. Another thing would be to make people collect multiple numbers from different places throughout town, before being able to put those into a set of coordinates to get to the final cache.

I'm surprised you didn't get anything when you searched. This question comes up in the forums about once a month. Anyway, if you're interested, here's a topic from a few weeks ago. Most Watched Caches

My first cache, I left a brand new travel bug. My recently placed cache, I put in a brand new Nalgene bottle.

I know you wanted responses from non-premium members, but I felt like sharing my opinion. In March of last year, I found an old PDA at a garage sale for relatively cheap. Slowly but surely, I was able to get all the correct updates for it, and I got all the right software, and it was working fine. And so my dad and I got a premium membership so that we could use pocket queries to go paperless. Then in July, my old PDA just sort of bit the dust. It kept crashing and it basically quit working. I had become accustomed to the paperless lifestyle and now I was being forced to go back to paper. Quite frankly, I didn't and still don't have a purpose other than geocaching to spend any real money on a PDA, and so I continue using paper. It was then that I realized that, the $30 I had paid wasn't really good for much other than pocket queries. There were no seriously great, usable features that I needed that premium membership offered. Jeremy, I would like to congratulate you on coming up with pocket queries. It is an incredibly versatile search tool. Unfortunately, for someone without a PDA it doesn't serve much purpose. I mean, sure it's more powerful than any search you could do on the site, but it's very rare that I need a very powerful search, but occasionaly I do. About once a month now, I set up a pocket query, sometimes just to look at cache densities on a map. Now in about three months, it will be time for me to renew. But I'm not really sure I will, because pocket query is the main thing that I feel I'm paying for as a premium member. But honestly, I will renew, if not to use the features, then to just support a website about the sport I love. Two things that pop into my mind however as perks that I think could be nice: 1. Some kind of discount in the Groundspeak store. It wouldn't even have to be major or year long, you could have maybe one month out of the year where premium members get 5-10% off anything in the store. This could be really great, and I bet you could make up for the losses real quick. 2. My other idea is a shorter approval que. Anyone who's ever been to Disneyworld probably knows about the fastpass. For a certain ammount extra to your ride pass, you can get the fast pass. Basically, they just keep a line for Fastpass users only, and they of course cater to that line first. So if a bunch of people with fastpasses walked into the line, they'd seat everyone in that line first, before they went back to the normal line. You could do this with cache approvals with some coding. Have it so premium member's caches get sent to a different que, or even just the top of the que. That wouldn't even have to be the way you'd do it. But that's my idea. Faster cache approvals for premium members. Not that my area is slow, (Keystone Approver is great) but I think this could really "entice" more people to join the cachewagon and become premium members...

I have several different configurations that I go back and forth between. Generally I keep all my caching stuff into organized plastic bags. One small bag is for my better and smaller trade items. I generally keep any geocoins, money, or travelbugs in this bag. It's basically the higher valued stuff that I think I'm more likely to trade. Next I have the bigger bag with tons of random trade stuff. Then I have what I call an the essentials bag. It's basically just extra batteries, pocket knife and flashlight. Then I have the added essentials which includes FRS radios, signal mirror, signal strobe, stuff like that. I switch back and forth between a smaller backpack meant for cycling and a much larger L.L. Bean daypack. Both of which let me just drop in my Camelback UnBottle, basically just an insulated stand-alone hydration bladder than goes into any pack. I fill those two packs with the different things in the bags depending on where I'm going. If I'm somewhere suburban, I'll the smaller pack with just minimalistic things, or I'll even just take the small, high value trade item ziplock baggie and put it in my pocket. If I'm going somewhere else, I generally take the daypack, and load it down, just for the heck of it.

I put my 100% trust in what Salvenius has said. About once a month or so in the Greater Pittsburgh area, the state police find a meth lab. The state police here treat meth labs as a serious biohazardous threat. Once it is established that a meth lab is present in a home, a security perimeter is set up, and HAZMAT teams are brought in to deal with the stuff. While the "throwaways" of meth production aren't nearly as dangerous, especially in an open area, it's still a threat, and should be treated that way. If you find "garbage" that meets the description of meth lab waste, and or just generally suspicious garbage, you should consider this a warning. I wouldn't call rangers or police unless you were sure, but use your common sense and keep your distance. And maybe stop in the park office on your way out and describe what you saw, and where you saw it, they'll undoubtedly call it in if they too think it's suspicious. But seriously folks, don't take the responsibility or risk upon yourself to dispose of this stuff. Maybe that garbage bag or tupperware you picked up and threw in the garbage wasn't dangerous to you, but think what might happen down the line. The bag may break when thrown into a garbage truck or dumpster, harming a sanitation worker. Please be vigilant, but be careful.

You people seem to be making such a big fuss over such a small thing. The guy will undoubtedly be wearing a bracelet on his ankle or wrist that tracks his movements. This is nothing new, alot of states use this. A similar system is used to contain people under house arrests. But anyway, it's nothing huge, it's a punishment that happens all the time.

We have officially been caching for a year as of the Thursday I believe. We have 49 finds and hope to get number 50 tommorrow. The numbers aren't anything important to me, I mean I've had hobbies where I put so much time, money, and effort into it in such a short ammount of time, that I was burned out within a month, but by taking geocaching slow, and not doing a whole lot, I'm conserving the fun factor.

Happy New Years and Happy Caching from TeamK-9!

I'm fourteen, going on 15 in a week or two, I'd love to chat with you. Just send me an email through my profile.

I have no clue what happened, and I'm no expert on canyoneering, I only know what I've read from books. But the report says that the boys were pulled from the canyon after being stranded and that none of them were seriously injured. One major threat in canyons is a flash flood. They can start from as little as an inch of rain tens of hundreds of miles up the canyon. That could be a possibility, but I doubt something so dramatic happened. My guess is that they became disoriented and couldn't find a way back out of the canyon.

We've subscribed to Outside for several years now, way before we even had heard about geocaching. Along those lines, my family also subscribes to National Geographic, National Geographic Adventurer, and Ski Magazine. But actually, because of geocaching, I was turned on to an endurance race in my area that I want to compete in, and because of that, I sort of got more interested in hiking and backpacking, outside of geocaching, and now I'm subscribing to Backpacker magazine.

I have Delorme Street Atlas, and find that it forces me to enter coords for caches in Decimal form, which is a slight pain in the butt. Plus, it's alot simpler to use a web based solution, then a paid program...