TinyMoon & The Pumpkin King

Maybe we should install GPS chips or LOJACK in our altoids cans and ammo boxes, so when they get muggled we can track down the perpetrators!

Ummm.... ?

We use a metal detector during our winter caching season. It helps in finding an ammo can buried under 6 feet of snow, and when it's only 2 degrees above Zero, you want to speed up the hunt a bit. It doesn't get used during the summer, I guess I feel like it gives an unfair advantage and takes the fun out of the hunt. Many parks that ban Metal Detectors do so because there was a Civil War Battle or similar "History" thing that happened there once, and they don't want hundreds of amatuers digging around for historically important objects and turning the park into a giant sandpit.

! We live near Onondaga Lake, and we're pretty sure the original meaning of Onondaga was "stinky swamp where Grandpa was carried away by Giant Skeetos"

Skaneateles..."skinny-AT-liss"...I'm from Camillus, only two towns over, and that's how most everyone here pronounces it. Radio-Free-Albany is way too far East to know how the locals rilly pronounce things 'round these parts!

I just saw a Black Helicopter hovering over our house...good thing I'm wearing my aluminum foil deflector beanie...deflects the Government's mind rays, dont'cha know ! http://zapatopi.net/afdb/ There's no such thing as Geo-Magnetic Storms, it's a cover-up to thwart Geocachers!

I've always thought it's not about finding what's in the cache, but finding the cache itself and even more, the HUNT for finding the cache. For my wife and myself (and for my parents, I think), our greatest caching stories are about the hunt, not the stuff we found.

My buddy at work, "The Justinator", is from there...he pronounces it "bray-zer" falls...I was quite stunned when I found out it's actually spelled "brasher"...he's from so far up North he talks with a Southern accent! We bust on him about it, saying he needs a Canadian passport to come to work, or that if you go too far North you just end up back down South ag'in !

Your caching technique and equipment for the winter months will be slightly different, esp. if you go after the "ammo-box-in-the-woods" types (those are our favorites!). We use a walking stick to poke thru' the snow drifts with (listen for the tell-tale "thunk thunk" noise when you hit paydirt!) we also use a metal detector, comes in handy when there's 6 feet of snow in the woods. In the backpack we carry a small shovel to dig out the snow, and a prybar incase it's frozen in ice. A few times I've packed in a Bernzomatic pocket torch to melt around the frozen ice (comes in handy if your cache is hidden in what would be a bog or swamp during summertime). Have fun! You'll most likely be the only cacher out there in the winter...here in Upstate NY caching grinds to a halt right after Thanksgiving.

I thought caches could be no closer than 250 apart... ? Anyhoo... There is a cache near Binghamton NY where the cacher who placed it explains right in the cache profile "this isn't where I wanted it, but it's where "they" made me put it, so when you get to my cache you'll find the co'ords to where I actually wanted it". It's a puzzle cache based on the German "Enigma" Encryption Machine of World War II. One of our own caches was originally denied, so we turned it into a multi, using the "original" Stage 1 as the "new" Stage 2...and it was approved and now everyone's happy.

During the winter months here in Upstate NY we use a metal detector to find those pesky ammo boxes buried under 6 feet of snow. Ours was a Christmas gift from my parents, who are also avid cachers and who borrow it on occasion! We also carry walking sticks (you poke them into snow drifts and listen for the telltale "thunk-thunk" noise) and folding snow shovels to dig the caches out. There aren't really any footprints to follow if you're looking for the "ammo-box-in-the-woods" caches as nobody around here bothers to look for them during the winter, they either hibernate or only search for the urban micros. I didn't bother mentioning the other equipment we use (skis, snowshoes, thermal undies), I'm sure where you live you've already got these. But grab a metal detector...if you search the threads you'll see that other cachers mention using them also.

In my wallet I still carry my Red Cross Canoe Certification Card that I got in Boy Scouts back in '83 !

My wife and I have a canoe, she sits in front, all of our caching gear goes in the middle (why the heck do we need to carry all this gear for simply playing "hide-and-seek" ?!) and I sit in the back. I've also kayaked (by myself, no passenger/copilot), and the kayak, being hollow, had a spot to store gear in. Kayaks are fun, but for a parent and a child, I'd recomend a canoe. They are actually very stable (we've canoed all the way across Oneida Lake for geocaching with no problem) and even on the off chance you flip one, they don't sink and you can flip it right back over and get in (it's not easy but you can do it). If you get a canoe, buy an extra "emergency" paddle and strap it in the canoe, they tend to get dropped on occasion and float away fast!

We went to the New York State Fair this summer. While there, we used our GPS to find caches that were hidden there. We also used the GPS to guide us back to our car in the parking lot, a parking lot that was filled with something like twenty thousand other cars! Came in pretty handy!

Yay! Stickpeople rock!

What defines "celebrity" ? Briansnat and certainly El Diablo are "celebrities" here in our own little world of Geocaching. In my local community of Upstate New York, if you bump into Anton, Hubbye or Mama Bear you've just had a brush with greatness!

We were at this waterfalls cache, GCKHM4, in Ithaca NY when a female hiker fell from the top of the ridge. Rescue workers had to rappel down the side of the gorge to get to her, and she was then helicoptered out. Through some amazing miracle she survived the fall.

Trails are trails because they are trails. Deer use them. Porcupines use them. And oh yeah, cachers use them. If you do enough "deep woods" hiking, your eyes will eventually get used to picking up what my wife calls "Critter Superhighways" cutting right thru' the woods, all the bunnies and deer etc. all hopping along the same path. And that's where a smart hunter will likely make his stand. We went out caching again today and we kept to the smaller county owned parks this time...but I still wore blaze orange!

Hmmm...there's no way I'm going to walk up to a fella who's been patiently waiting in the woods for 6 hours with a high powered rifle to shoot at something, and try to explain to him how I'm sorry that I scared away his quarry but it's only because I'm searching for a tupperware container full of Happy Meal toys... I may wind up mounted over his fireplace !

Geocaching leads to a healthier "you"! My wife and I spent most of last summer caching, and most of this past summer riding the motorcycle (which is far less strenuous than hiking through a forest with a 20 pound backpack). Needless to say, we are far more "pudgy" this fall than we were last fall! Motorcycles are !fun! but now we wheeze like a broken steam engine after climbing even a small hill, so we've vowed to start doing more caching again.

We went on a "deep woods" caching expedition today, the cache was located a mile and a half into the state forest from the nearest "limited use" (i.e. DIRT!) road. Seeing as how it's deer hunting season in NY State, we were festooned in all kinds of Blaze Orange clothing so no one would mistake us for something warm, fuzzy and tasty. We hiked for about an hour into the forest and heard only a few gunshots, got to within .20 miles of the cache and whoops!...there was a deer hunter in a blind, right smack where the trail was leading. He didn't look none to happy, and neither were we...we were already and hour's hike into the forest, almost at the cache and now we had to turn around and hike out, empty handed. This isn't the first time our caching activities have been de-railed by hunting season, it's happened before. What do the rest of you do during "Duck Season, Wabbit Season, Duck Season!"?

You mean to tell me you didn't see the Black Helicopters in "whisper mode" circling over your head?

A guy I work with, his father was killed 2 winters ago when he stopped on an Interstate to help out a lady with a flat tire, and somebody flew past and ran him down. Well anyway, that aside, I'll still stop to help someone out. Last winter my wife and I were out 4x4'ing and geocaching in the snow, we came across some deer hunters who had their 4x4 bogged down in a snowy ditch, they were miles and miles from the middle of nowhere. I pulled out my chain and we yanked them from the ditch, and they promised not to shoot at us while we looked for the cache . You should always try to help someone out, it's what makes America strong.

Here's a neat Sunset/Moonrise we caught while motorcycle-caching a few months ago ...and while we're at it, seeing as how many of us are nightcachers anyhoo, here's another moonrise we filmed while doing a cemetery night-cache...boo!

Here's one I cooked up quick...