ShadowAce

I have always felt that the numbers are more indicative of the location of the cacher then anything else. People in LA and San Diego will by fault have more finds then someone who lives in Beaver Utah. Why? Because you cannot spit in San Diego without hitting a cache while in other places people have to drive hundreds of miles to get a cache. It floors me when I hear a cacher make a 'man, you have less then 400 finds, you do not know how to cache' type of statement and I think if peoples stats were removed from the logs then it would not harm anything. Those that want to pump there numbers by logging the same cache or same event can do so. Others, who actually log No Finds and who do not log a 'Your container is missing, thanks for the find' smiley can go on about there business. You know someone is caching for numbers when the log reads: I could tell where the container was, but it is gone now. Thanks for the find. Those people can still look at there own profile and be happy and brag all they wish. If a vote was taken my choices would be: 1) find count removed from cache page 2) find count made static 3) leave it as it is.

I just figured out the puzzle. It is actually fairly sneaky.

As someone who usually enjoys puzzles and having hidden a few, I can say that I do get offended when someone solves it and then starts helping others. If you and someone else who have never solved it work together there is no issue, but as I tell others who ask for hints on ones I have solved, once I solve it all hints and help must come from the cache owner. I agree there are some that your brain has to be wired a special way to understand and those just sit there with a happy little '?' icon. Someday I will have the brain storm. There are some puzzles that I actually spent over 4 months working to solve. The reward and thrill is worth it, but the splinters in the head from banging the head on the wall make you wonder. My advice would be find a buddy in your area that has not solved it and throw ideas back and fourth. If all else fails ........ Google it.

Godwin's Law invoked. Actually, those Jeremy uses that phrase a lot, it has nothing to do with Nazi or Hitler. It has to do with people who make rules that others have to live by. That is why I also refered to them as TBCops and TBPolice. The difference is that some people are going beyond law enforcement and becoming Law writers.

Just as with any cache, the owner of the cache has some leeway in the way it works. I have no concerns with TB hotels. I do have trouble with TB Cops People who are so bitter about life that they send raving hate mails to other cachers about how a TB was or was not handled. I have a few TBs in the wild and mostly they sit untouched. My family loved playing with TBs and we will take photo's and enjoy them. Some people will never touch them. Some people will place them in a cache that is so ermote and unvisited that 1 year later they are still in the same cache. An example would be Italian Spring Trail. A cacher from Pheonix came all the way to Tucson and then dropped in what should be considered vacation caches. This poor TB Anakin Skywalker was picked up by a single cacher then placed in the middle of no where. My family has gone back to caches to remove TBs we placed because it had not moved in 3 weeks. If you really are concerned about TB Hotel rules, maybe you should back off from the TB scene before you get to a level that you also yell and complain about TB's then place them inside your own made prison. Finding a TB to replace a TB is simple. Yes you will have to go back to a cache you have been too most likely to make it happen quickly, but you can Always search for TBs and go grab one to move a TB along. I say it is just as important to respect the other cachers and honor there cache as it is to respect the TB owner by ensuring you do what you can to assist in the TBs goal. Aha.. The TB Cops have stuck again. CDs & TBs I think this shows my point from above rather well. You will be interested to know this is not the first time this has happened and this individual has been asked by many of the local, ah heck, statewide cachers to be more considerate in his practice of geocaching. This time a visiting cacher from Michigan was disappointed to find all the TBs missing and then upset to see why. When the Travel Bug Gestapo makes the rules, only they will enjoy the sport.

If I can add my piece to the discussion.. I see no problem at all or anything wrong with the TB idea. I have taken more then a good number of 'memorial' TBs and moved them along the way. I love TBs and I like the personalities that can come with them. I would be much more interested in grabbing this TB then the standard McToy with a goal of 'See the world'. Your TB seems to have special meaning and as such it is a special TB. I once moved a TB that was in honor of someone who died before ever getting to make the vacation they had always planned to make. My family and I carried that TB through 6 states and made sure to hit many caches with it to honor the person it was for. Now the scarey part is we never figured out if the powder stuff inside was the person it was for.. Ack@!! As for the cache? Well that is nothing I can comment on because it will depend on the rules and regulations of your local area for the cache placement. If it is in a National Park or Fish & Wildlife area, do not hold your breath on it being listed.

First I love guns. I own guns. I have a permit to carry guns. That said.. I would not suggest a gun as a TB because of the rules and regulations of many locations. We have Parks that allow caching but not guns. Picture this if you will.... Billy gets to the cache and finds a neat gun, he laughs and slides it into his belt to carry down the hillside. As he is walking through the lovely landscape Mr smith and his family see this young man in torn up jeans with a pistol sticking out of his pants. Mr smith is concerned so he quietly dials his cell phone. Billy continues on down the trail and is met up by Sandy the local ranger and her buddies the local police. While Billy is trying to explain it is a toy he reaches back and grabs it and thrusts it forward. Mr yoyo draws his pistol and yells 'Drop the weapon'. We will stop the imagination at this point because I would hope it would not go that far, but now how would you like to be in Billy's shoes and have to explain that it is just a game and it is just a toy. Now image Sally's response when she goes to explain to her boss that they just called out police on a cap gun. Where does geocaching now sit in the minds of the park rangers? Alas, there is a time and a place for everything, but I feel caching and guns are not a required combination.

ROFL.. I wonder how long it will take for someone to remove the tag and install the tire.

Yellow Lock The above link is to an archived cache that I tried many times to get. Saddly the key would disappear then it ended up inside the container. Cacher owner eventually abandoned the cache and someone else adopted it promising to make it better. They turned around and archived the cache in less then one month without ever fixing the problem or getting it back online. The opinion I have on this is it can be a great idea _when_ it works.. You might consider a combo lock instead of a key though. If the Tb goes missing you can create a New one with the combo attached without having to cut new keys for your lock. The drawback (I will say this before someone else jumps on my back and tries to pummel me) is that some cachers will turn around and give the combo to others without making them hunt the TB down. You also should be concerned with the once a month cacher who takes the TB and does not put it back in circulation for 3 to 4 months. I have a TB that went belly up for months until the holder finally went for another cache. A second way to avoid the issue is hide a 'hide a key' object in the vacinity of the cache. If the TB ends up missing or kidnapped you can always change it to have them find the key as a multi location cache. My family likes to travel around and hit caches in other states, so sometimes these are frustrating as we go and find the cache the key is supposed to be in but the last person took it out two days before and had not logged it, now we have just driven a good distance out of our way and cannot complete our objective. Just thoughts to think on....

I had a similar experience with a bug a long while back. I contacted the Tb owner and informed them of the locations I knew it had been. The owner then did some back date logs and I continued it on the journey once they finished. I would suggest you let the owner of the TB make the decision since none of us know what will or will not upset them.

Some people got tired of the emails about how they: 1) need to learn to read. 2) Should never have put a TB in that cache 3) Took a TB the wrong direction 4) Picked up a TB that did not want to be moved yet 5) add whatever comment local TB Cops use I know a good number of cachers that have received email from a few people who did not own the TB, had no say in the TB's goal and really were doing nothing then make a pain out of themselves. So these people quit touching TBs. I personally just delete the emails from said people and laugh as I do it. Many cachers are actually nice people and they take offense at being told how stupid they are by some unknown individual in the darkness of a cache name. So if you want people to keep moving TBs around, maybe there should be a few less TB Cops??

Just as with any cache, the owner of the cache has some leeway in the way it works. I have no concerns with TB hotels. I do have trouble with TB Cops People who are so bitter about life that they send raving hate mails to other cachers about how a TB was or was not handled. I have a few TBs in the wild and mostly they sit untouched. My family loved playing with TBs and we will take photo's and enjoy them. Some people will never touch them. Some people will place them in a cache that is so ermote and unvisited that 1 year later they are still in the same cache. An example would be Italian Spring Trail. A cacher from Pheonix came all the way to Tucson and then dropped in what should be considered vacation caches. This poor TB Anakin Skywalker was picked up by a single cacher then placed in the middle of no where. My family has gone back to caches to remove TBs we placed because it had not moved in 3 weeks. If you really are concerned about TB Hotel rules, maybe you should back off from the TB scene before you get to a level that you also yell and complain about TB's then place them inside your own made prison. Finding a TB to replace a TB is simple. Yes you will have to go back to a cache you have been too most likely to make it happen quickly, but you can Always search for TBs and go grab one to move a TB along. I say it is just as important to respect the other cachers and honor there cache as it is to respect the TB owner by ensuring you do what you can to assist in the TBs goal.

Solved in 1.2 seconds. So it must be a solvable puzzle. Thanks.

I believe there is a lot more information that is not being given. From what has been said in our local listserv versus the information provided here. It would appear galdrich is trying to open a fight without giving the community of cachers all the information that has been provided to most of the locals. Like the example of breaking it into stages of multi caches Like his desire to create a geotax of 'you should leave another cache' and other things the reviewer posted to our listserv. So this will be fun to watch a one sided argument.

So lets try this.. I fly into the area at 8am and see this cache. I go find stage one and head to a public library and email the solution. I then wait at the library fro the next part of information. Three hours later I am still sitting at the library waiting for the next stage. I finally leave in disgust that a cacher would setup a cache like this. The next day I check email and see I have stage two email.. ok, I am excited again and go get the information and mail it back. I then sit for 3 more hours at the library and once more leave in disgust. My plane leaves in 2 more hours. Can I get the rest of the information for the cache before I leave town? How many days of email bouncing back and fourth will it require to get all the information? Will the cache owner respond to email 24/7? I am sure the cache owner will answer emails while at home and work and will not take weekends away from the computer. No vacations are planned that would cause lack of responses as well? These might be some of the reasons that an automated response system was suggested?

MOC caches are as good or as lame as any other cache hidden. I have found MOC caches where I just had to cry when we finished and I have found some that were amazing. I created a few MOC caches myself because it allows a member to get the FTF honors, after it has been found, I remove the MOC option. I also used it as an MOC because an owner can see who has looked at a cache page via an audit log with an MOC cache. This let me know how many members were actually interested in a puzzle I designed. After a couple of weeks and two finders, I removed the MOC status. Using MOC as a way to entice people to pay is not a great idea in my humble opinion as Groundspeak has no say in what type of cache it is. Another breath strip shoved under a bush used for dogs to pee on is not something I would really want to use as a reason to get people to start paying for membership.

Love it Once more a round of applause for Jeremy and the gang.

Once again, thanks Jeremy and crew. I love it....

My eight year old is willing to tackle almost any climb that I can go on. On top of Table Top Mountain. Here are the 5 year old and eight year old. Image cropped because it was a puzzle cache. They both climbed Cave Mountain with me. Son made it to the top of Blackett's ridge Yes, I could go on, but your bored already.. Can you tell we love to hike? .. Keep on caching.

Work with your local cachers is the only suggestion. New people come to the sport daily, if all they see are micro urban hides, they learn this to be geocaching. they then try to make a new micro. Which in turn leads to more micros. If everyone stopped searching for, as my family calls them, ubermicros then people would eventually stop hiding them. I feel a micro has it's place sometimes, but when you get 40 caches in a day and the largest is a small size altoids tin, it is sad. My children do not enjoy micros, so we usually avoid them if the kids are coming. Banning them would be futile and silly in my opinion. Searching for them if you dislike them is even funnier. I hide caches I know my friends enjoy, if we do not like looking for the smallest button container ever made, we do not look for them.

Those are indeed the blinky lights as they were reported.. The thing to be careful of with these is: Lets go to another forum. I have seen alot of damaged areas because people place caches like this in urban settings. The container itself is not the problem. Placing it inside a row of flowers can be.. Keeping a logbook in it is also difficult.

Along the same token is the cacher who writes on a wall near a flowerbed. they do not tell you to look for written material. After enough cachers search for the wee tiny micro in the area, the flowerbed looks like dogs played in it. I notice a few cachers this they are getting cute by hiding more and more difficult micros, but in many of these cases if you come to the area after about 12 'found' logs not to mention the 15-20 non posted DNF's, you can clearly tell that the area is not like it used to be. I do not mind a good hide, but when you have to go through someone else's property and tear up plants and trees, you have pushed the limit. We have a problem with it in Arizona, but only through the actions of cachers can it be resolved. No reviewer can visit every cache to check the placement. they have to rely on the assistance of the geocaching community to help. This translates to ... Post a note to a reviewer or email your local reviewer if you want to remain invisible in the process. Digital pictures are amazing items. Send them to your reviewer. Thanks for bringing up the issue. Cache well and keep it clean. edited to mention -- reviewer call on us as cachers sometimes, help your reviewer out and they will be grateful.

I have found a gift certificate to a local mall works well. Silver dollars seem to get grabbed up quickly.. Certificates are fun to collect. We even have some local cachers who created military dog tags with the name of the cache and between 1 - 10 of them numbered. It is neat to see at an event who brings how many dogtags from what caches.. A couple of local teams create T-Shirts with logo's and statements.. Anyways, just a few of our local ideas...

Lets see.. Nope, not worth it. Cache On.. The fun is in the hunt, the finds are a bonus.