Shiraz-mataz

I was the den leader for my son's Cub Scout den and was always looking for something interesting to do. One of the den mothers actually discovered this particular activity. She told me one of her friends was into "geo CASH-ing" which was some kind of orienteering treasure hunt. I dismissed the idea at first until I found out that one of my coworkers was into it too. After hours and hours of talking about it at work I was stoked to hit the trails! The rest, as they say, is history...

With the exception of winter months I rarely wear more than my trusty Teva Terra-Fi sandals while caching. They are tough AND comfortable on almost any terrain. But my favorite form of footwear is actually no footwear at all - I love to hike barefoot. No, really. People did it for thousands and thousands of years and if one takes a step back from the marketing hype shoved down our throats from Nike et. al., there's no imperative to fork over a small fortune for something you (gasp) may not really need... It ain't for everyone though - hike your own hike. (I do like my Tevas though!)

To the OP, was the cache page archived or somehow totally removed as though it never existed? The only cache hide listed under your profile is one called Case and Pickens, and it doesn't appear to be the one in question since people are still logging finds on it.

You-da-man Dinoprophet! I was sitting here at work doing the same thing (yes, I'm a little bored too...). Looks like your super-sleuthing powers beat me to the punch!

I ran a "nearest caches" Google Maps check and think you may have discovered "Marauder's T.B. Motel and Super Cache." (GCH4G7). It shows up as being 0.2 miles away from the coordinates you listed. Quite a distance for a container to move on its own but you never know - the flooding or a muggle may have moved it or the coordinates written on the side might be a little off. There were a lot of recent DNF's logged on its cache page so you ought to contact the owner and let them know you may have found it.

I'd posted a long "not while caching" post earlier but all this sports talk reminded me of one more. A couple years ago I took my son to an Orioles game. They were playing the Boston Red Sox that day. Sitting two rows in front of us was women's soccer star Mia Hamm. She was there to watch her Red Sox boyfriend play - Nomar Garciapara.

Hey g0t0pless, how about posting the coordinates of these markings so we can check 'em out in Google Maps...

We have vacationed in Myrtle Beach every summer for over ten years, staying up in the North Myrtle Beach end of the Grand Strand. I'd have to say the caches are a little sparse up that way but the quality is pretty good. Someone else recommended the state parks south of town - that sounds like a great idea!

Never used this one but it crossed my mind a couple times on cache hunts near houses... "I'm doing the initial property survey for a 500 unit apartment complex. The basketball court and playground should go right... about... HERE! Oh, is that your house next door? Gee, I hope it's not too loud for you..."

I found the skeleton of a pirate once! It held the clue to a large final cache. Kinda scared me because I wasn't expecting it but it was way cool! Check it out...

I'd imagine the incidence of running into someone famous while caching has got to be very rare! I've never run into anyone famous out in the woods, that's for sure. But it did make me think about the handful of famous people I have met in my lifetime... Tiny Tim (Tiptoe through the Tulips), I met him during intermission while he was performing with a circus that visited my town. Tom Clancy, the novelist. He lives about an hour away and visited the flight simulator I worked at. For the tour, he signed all six (at the time) of his books for me! Cathy Silvers - from "Happy Days." She was working the auto-show circuit, geez, must have been 25 years ago!!! A few local TV personalities/news anchors from Columbia, SC. Gene Cernin, the last man to walk on the moon (he says "the LATEST" person to walk on the moon). Miss South Carolina (circa 1982). Walked her to her car after an MDA telethon I was helping to run. Sam Nunn (Senate Arms Services Committee) Don Geronimo and Mike O'Mara, nationally syndicated radio DJ's who also visited my simulator facility I think I saw Rhea Perlman (Cheers) at an airport once. Also at Washington National Airport I saw Tim Russert talking on the phone. Again at the airport, I saw Clinton advisor James Carville. And anchorman Ted Koppel has a house in this county and I've bumped into him a couple times while out and about. My cousin is a fairly well-known artist back in South Carolina named "Blue Sky." (he changed his name to that from Warren Johnson). He's famous for his murals around the state. The previous poster mentioned Hootie and the Blowfish... Darius Rucker and another band member (Jim Sonnefeld?) and I attended the University of South Carolina during the same years. They are in my yearbooks but were not famous at the time. They were performing as a group back then in the Five Points area but I never saw them. Cool Stuff!

I usually cache pretty lite with all my cachin' gear stuffed in my son's retired Harry Potter backpack. GPSr Compass Handheld metal detector (Really! I've used it to find carabiners!) Pens/Pencils Spare baggies My signature stamps and ink pad Camera Walkin' stick/Root hole poker Bug spray in the summer Water/Snacks if it's going to be a long hike Cell phone Any swag I plan to trade Geez, that's a lot more than I thought! It all pretty much just rides around in my truck in case something comes up.

Sadly no... My first cache find was the victim of a growing problem with people dumping their trash nearby. The hiders gave up and reinvented the theme somewhere else.

While visiting Oz in 2001, I discovered and fell in love with their fine wine, "Shiraz." I took that as part of my handle and added "mataz" just because it rhymed! As a matter of related interest... my avatar picture was taken in Kuranda, a town in north Queensland. I thought it was cool because it's at a crossroads, about as faaaaar from home as I can get without actually leaving the planet.

It's weird - I have trouble remembering "important" stuff like coworker's names, deadlines, history... but I can generally remember most details about the caches I've visited. Granted, I only have a couple hundred finds but I do read through my old log entries once in awhile for fun. And like another poster, I will be driving around with my wife and say, "Guess what!!! There's a cache stuck to the back side of that pay phone over there!" Of course she too rolls her eyes and says, "GEEK!"

We have a music theory cache here in southern Maryland. It's a puzzle cache of phenominal complexity! The guy who placed it is a fellow engineer who has a flare for encryption methods and the result in this case was a puzzle that festered in my mind for over a month until it finally unravelled. It's called Salieri's Prank. I don't want to spoil anything here by revealing the encryption technique but the trebel clef of a Mozart Piano Concerto is shown as composed. The bass clef has been substituted (by Mozart's rival, Salieri) with apparent gibberish as a joke. It's your job to figure out how to decode the music and find a very clever, very well-stocked cache of music related swag.

Wow... What a fantastic idea! I'm going to have to do something locally for a very special reason. Our community is fortunate to be the home for one of the few surviving members of Easy Company: Clancy Lyall. A couple years ago when my son crossed over from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, one of the leaders suggested getting Clancy Lyall to speak at the ceremony. We don't have HBO and I'd never actually watched the series so I didn't know who he was. At first I thought the kids might be bored at having to listen to some guy talking about a war that may as well be ancient history to them. Boy, was I wrong! The adults were of course enthralled but the kids were hanging on his every word and fired off question after question. One young scout asked, "Did you ever kill anyone?" You could hear the hushed gasps from the adults at the "unmentionable" question but Mr. Lyall smiled and said, "I'm glad you asked that!" Taking a serious tone, he related the horrors of war as best he could to a young audience some 60 years removed, answering, "Honestly, I don't know... I hope not but I probably did." And from that launching point went on to talk about the value of life and the responsibility we have to protect the freedom we enjoy. So best of luck in placing a "Band of Brothers" themed cache and thanks for giving me a great idea!

Props sound like a cool addition to a cache hunt! I have only come across one that actually used one though. It was a pirate-themed multi and stashed away DEEP inside the woods, one stage of the multi was a large plastic Halloween skeleton wearing a pirate hat. The skeleton held the clue to the final stage. It was so cool I had to take a picture of it. It was so far off the beaten path in an out of the way corner of the park that the odds are against any muggle ever happening across it. But if they did - it might scare the heebie-jeebies outta them!!!

I once found a dead German Shepard stuffed in a large garbage bag, dumped along a trail in a county park, its grisly teeth glaring through a rip in the bag. Subsequent cachers logged about the dog's state of decomposition. The cache hiders were upset about this and eventually pulled their cache. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the dog was dispatched by a neighbor and unceremoniously dropped in a convenient spot.

The most expensive item I've ever left in a cache was a ticket to an amusement park we visited while on vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was worth a little over $25 I guess... You can read about it by clicking here.

Since the OP is from Bristol, VA, might I suggest something a little closer to home??? Just down the road from you in good ol' St. Mary's County, Maryland, we have an eclectic mix of some of the best quality caches you'd ever hope to find. Search on the 20650 zip code with a 30 mile radius. Come in the summer and enjoy some hard crabs!

I think it's perfectly acceptable to solve a puzzle (almost) any way you can. It's not exactly fair to say that you solved a crossword puzzle in the newspaper if you knew the answers were on the next page and you peaked a few times. But that's not exactly what we're talking about here. As long as you don't flagrantly violate the hider's intent or your own personal mores... A couple years ago I was working on a multi. The coordinates for the first stage takes people to the public library. Though the cache page doesn't tell you that explicitly, I realized what it was and was able to use the library's online catalog to look up the information I needed for stage two without ever going to the library itself. The cache owner was okay with that as long as I didn't reveal any information in my log.

Awesome picture! I'm amazed by how little overlap there is of antipodal landmasses. The idea of placing polar opposite caches would be a challenge when almost every spot on land has water on the other side of the earth. Looks like you could find some overlap with New Zealand and Spain....

Why does anybody do anything? Why do I like tromping around in the woods when my wife mocks me from the comfort of our living room? Why do I love vegetables when my kids would lay down and starve to death next to a can of string beans? Ah... questions which require deep thought... In a nutshell, it gets me outta the house! But when I think back to the very first time someone explained geocaching to me, the thought that there was something secretly hidden "out there" somewhere and that I could find it intrigued me to no end. It's probably similar to the emotions felt by Dr. Robert Ballard back in 1985 as he peered into a monitor at the blurry image of rocks and sand some two and a half miles below, hoping for a hint at the resting place of the Titanic. Imagine his elation when those boilers came into view... Kinda like catching that first glimpse of a Rubbermaid container under a root ball??? Well, maybe a little... We're all a little like Robert Ballard, but with significantly smaller budgets and less whiz-bangery search tools. And maybe our booty amounts to McToys and dollar store junk instead of priceless artifacts from an underwater grave but the reward is internal and no less real. For me specifically, as an only child I am a bit of a loner and prefer to cache by myself or with my kids when they are willing. I'll opt for a cache in the woods over an urban cache any day and am doubly impressed if the hider has invested time in making a clever container and/or a good theme. Swag is ok but I rarely trade - if I do it is always even or up. I enjoy relating my experiences of the hunt in my log on the GC cache page - it's a way of giving back to the hider, sharing more than a simple "TFTC." Travel bugs are pretty fun. I usually check to see if a cache has any TB's in it before I go out and I read the TB's mission. If it doesn't have a mission I won't bother with it. If the mission is kind of cool I will take the TB only if I can help it along. I haven't moved very many TB's but if you look at those I have handled, you will be impressed with some of their adventures (one I am particularly proud of!).

I thought geocachers were the "pariahs" of the Appalachian Trail... Instead of "leave no trace" we are more along the line of "leave some Tupperware!" Are you sure they would want our involvement? I read through the web site in the provided link and it didn't make a lot of sense.