MapheadMike

The cache you mention appears to have been on NPS owned land. That agency has an overall caching ban, although some rangers and park units are more diligent than others in going out to retrieve caches. It looks like you had one of the more diligent rangers.

I sent word to the local cache group in our area. Some of them will likely make their way to the thread and go from there.

I decided to have three drivers. Add Dick Trickle (it's the only Junie Donlevay car I could find). I'll pick the third driver later.

Oh lovely, a boundary dispute. That'll be fun for all park users, not just cachers. I can't imagine any cachers have gone to look at the parcel or tax maps in the area, but we do use topomaps here. Any idea which version of the boundary is supported by the USGS maps?

Update? Landowner claim, T or F? Cache rescued from the office?

The main problem is access. The find reports, plus the trip descriptions on confluence.org all report difficulties in finding access to that National Forest tract. It is apparently surrounded by private property. You should consider some research before driving down. Maybe contact the NFS District office and find out how they access that tract themselves. Just speaking for myself, I wouldn't want to spend hiking/caching time chasing down access issues, especially with the length of drive it would take to get there.

I thought I had fallen for that once, but it turned out I had transposed a digit instead. However, I'm sure the original poster double checked his number several times. YP is right, it's lame. Not everyone who logs WG wants to parent bills into the system.

Been there, done that. Welcome to the club. It's almost Christmas with the associated trips to Grandma's. Without knowing the specifics, the correct answer (probably) is to release it ASAP so someone on the move this week can grab it for a trip in the right direction. If you have a local caching group, mention the bug there to see if anyone is definitely headed in the right direction.

I do both. I discovered both around the same time. When I first got started, neither geocaching nor letterboxing had enough objects hidden to make a decent hobby by itself. How things have changed in that regard. Not using GPS makes both hobbies seem a bit closer to being the same as well. There is a new letterboxing site that allows logging of finds. That site is Atlasquest. But only a limited number of letterboxers use that site. It is growing at a decent pace. Secrecy is part of letterboxing that comes from its origins back in England. To my knowledge, there isn't any site that lists Dartmoor letterboxes as close to comprehensively as letterboxing.org covers American letterboxes (briansnat mentioned other sources for clues here), let alone as comprehensively as geocaching.com covers geocaches. Some owners simply don't want their creations to be logged publicly, or even talked about publicly. In the case of certain mystery boxes, that view is justified. There are some letterboxes where determining the right park, or even the right state, is part of the puzzle. Publicly mentioning/logging that you found a mystery letterbox, then mentioning/logging the non-mystery letterboxes (or geocaches, or restaurants, or towns, etc.) found that same day (or even weekend) would lessen the mystery, since you've narrowed down the area. DNF reports tend to be useless too. How can a DNF be considered a problem if you may have been searching 1000 miles away from the actual location? The problem of missing boxes is more prevelent and that just a difference that you'll have to decide to accept as part of the game, or not accept it and stick to caching. The letterboxing PTB decided that they were going to letterbox in one fashion while the geocaching PTB decided differently. There are flaws in each approach. Posted clues leading to a letterbox that missing is the downside there. Removing clues/coordinates based on an owner's non-response while possibly leaving geolitter in the field is the downside of the geocaching approach. (edited for grammar)

It's definitely easier to let the major mapping sites plot the points at home than whatever technique is being imagined that would use a calcualtor. I've seen the conversions that some others use elsewhere in the thread and I couldn't begin to imagine trying such things in the field. Edscott is another among the avid orienteers who plays this game without GPS. Ed started a little before me. Most of his geocaching learning curve was on display in the form of old forum posts, both his questions and answers, so I learned a lot by just reading there. I can read a topo map but I knew absolutely less than nothing of the different standards for plotting latitude and longitude (NAD27, WGS84, etc.). It took a while to learn why certain map sites were not plotting the exact spot. Topozone was plotting points in NAD27 for the first few years of geocaching's existence, so most of my early finds were 50 yard grid searches, since that's all the accuracy I had. After learning the reasons for the map problems and adjusting (jeeep.com has a good utility that was useful for a while), I finally found lostoutdoors.com (Ed's posts were the source), which plots points in WGS84 onto topos and aerial photos. Now Topozone and most of the other major mapping sites plot points in WGS84 by default. Lostoutdoors.com is still the best site to use. Their maps and photos can be copied as a single image onto a document, which you can then scale to fit your circumstances. I've used photos blown up as much as 1:1,500 (that make sense with my compass, YMMV). What I've done is plot the first stage plus some reference points onto a map of the area. The four reference points would be an the lat/long rounded in each direction to the nearest 1/10th minute. For a first stage latitude of 37° 46.945, I'd plot 37 47.000 and 37 46.900. For a first stage longitude of 77° 32.426, I'd plot 77 32.500 and 77 32.400. Then I'd have the makings of a small grid, in the format that cachers actually use, that I could plot the second stage and subsequent stages with. No conversions from lat/long to UTM and no field math. It works great of you avoid errors in the field (like plotting dd mm.yz instead of dd mm.xyz, that's a confession to some Richmond area friends from last January). If you make a plotting error, or the map that you print doesn't cover the right area, then going back home to print a fresh map is a valid option too.

I was planning on a small diecast, but that's not a bad idea. I'll have to look into it. I'll tolerate that for this race, since in real life (not necessarily racing stats, since Dave never had the good fortune to be hired by ultra-rich Rick Hendrick), we know that Jeff Gordon will never rise to the level of Dave Marcis.

Because I like Ed Ferree . Rodney Orr might not have a car out, since he died while practicing for his first WC race , but I'm sure there are plenty of diecasts for drivers that a lot of newer or casual fans have never heard of. Fortunately, NASCAR keeps the type of results that you'd expect of a major league sports group, so learning if a driver is "legal" for this event shouldn't be too hard. I'm entering Dave Marcis.

For those who want to see this area, Quantico Orienteering Club (a civilan club with historic ties to the base) will have a meet in this same area on December 12. QOC's website has the details. We will hang our own controls (not the ammo box stands described), and unfortunately not offer GPS coordinates for this meet. We will also use our own five-color map. But it will be navigating in the same area, and anyone who tries the intermediate course should still a couple of examples of these. Cost and times are on the website.

I'm at 252 without a GPS. A few other orienteers are doing this without a GPS too. It's not that rare. Walden Run is placing caches with no complaints so it looks like it's possible. I'm guilty of what was suggested above, but that's because I set my first one before I had enough experience in caching to do it right. The online resources such as lostoutdoors.com and terrafly.com make finding exact spots a lot easier, so it shouldn't be any trouble now to get coordinates right the first time. We'll find out in the next few weeks.

Isn't it time for an update on this subject? I see that all the caches in Lums Pond are still posted as disabled and nothing has been replaced in Killens Pond.

A log on confluence.org shows a photo of a buoy at 0/0.

This thread makes the custom rim with good tire I found on a beach on the way to a cache (Cussler's Myth, Hampton VA) seem almost ordinary. Got a few funny looks rolling that thing back (925 yards) to the car, especially since the weight of the rim kept it from rolling straight unguided. It just missed being the right size for my brother in law's car . One lady said something sarcastic, like "I didn't know there was an airhose out there". My answer was "somebody had to clean it". She apologized and admitted she had passed it in place all summer.

This situation destroyed one of my pre-existing notions about authorities and cache placement. I visited Grand Central last year when there were only 200 or so posts. I was a little worried at first, but I guessed that any cache that had 200 or so posts would have to be known to authorities, so it would be fine. If there was any reasonable amount of security on that perimeter, they would have seen at least one of the first 200 visitors and learned of the cache. I am literaly shocked to learn that this wasn't the case. I also thought I saw a survellance camera on one of the light posts in the area (SW of the cache covering the whole east part of the closed ramp). That would have made some sense to use such things in that area. I even waved to the alleged camera, and I was there about 45 minutes after sunset. I left that area thinking that the airport authority was cool to handle their security in a manner that let ordinary people alone. And they did let us (and planespotters and joggers) alone until this week, although they apparently didn't mean to. I'm glad the O&L got out OK. Four hours and handcuffs seem excessive to me and I wonder if he isn't being too good a sport about that. It could have been worse, but the officers could have read the cache sheet in the cache (one was there when I visited) or in O&L's possession (if he was carrying one) and handled this in fifteen minutes. I also appreciate Sparrowhawk's efforts for that cache, both his maintance help and the parking info. That discussion last week seemed a bit harsh, but helping another cacher out is always cool. Even if circumstances and rules have changed since it was originally placed, I see no errors in leaving it grandfathered in the system nor in visiting it while it was active. What does the gentleman think "court costs" are? Innocent people don't have to pay them, but guilty people do. Note from O&L's telling, the "tough guy cop" said "I wish we could bill...". This seemed to be after they realized they couldn't because it would be tough to successfully prosecute someone for being the 400+th visitor to that cache. Note in the Indiana stories that the sheriff was going to "tally the costs and talk to the prosecutor". My layperson knowledge of such things says that you can't force payment of such a bill without convicting the cacher of a crime. I was concerned about the Indiana deal, since his threat to collect costs implied that charges would be filed, but that threat is hopefully dissapating.

Sleepy Hollow in Delaware, a 1/1 unfound since May 14. It has a friend's TB (that I left there on May 14) that could use some movement. Sorry for not doing the link thing.

Thanks for the Star-Press article link. Someone finally got it right in Indiana.

Geolitter retrievals should be rewarded and you found the cache. I think you should log a find. A what if... What if the owner had refurbished the cache before your hike? Would it be fair to disqualify you from EVER logging a find on that cache because you recieved coords from the approver for the geolitter removal? Maybe you would have left the paper at home, but you'd have likely remembered them if you needed them in the field. Keep the coords. No one has the right to litter a park with an inactive cache. You might be cleaning it soon anyway.

I think there is a different reason why archived caches should be made easier to find. Not everyone is responsible like The Leprechans and removes caches from the woods when archived. Some caches are archived when the owner goes inactive and the caches are left in the field as geo-litter. I had one such cache on my watch list (GC143B); I suspected it was still in the woods, so I kept the listing in my watchlist. I eventually went and found the archived cache in place 18 months after it was archived. I tried to adopt and replace it, but a new cache was too close, so I eventually removed it. Some may think that only falls on the individual irresponsible cacher, but I expect that repeated instances would mess up the hobby overall as we gain a reputation of not being able to clean up after ourselves, CITO events not withstanding. Fortunately, this circumstance is rare. But any instance is too much. I believe that a list of archived caches should be made available so that we (responsible cachers hobby-wide in general) can check to make sure that they are really out of the woods. In some (hopefully most) cases, we would only need to read in the logs where the responsible owner said he/she cleaned the spot, or a prior finder confirmed that it really was gone. Other spots would need a prior finder to actually go out and check the location and clean any litter. Cases where someone removed their listings from GC.com and relisted them with a competitive caching site would also need to be noted so they can be left alone (I've got two in my area like that). I've suggested such help from TPTB; the refusal to offer info on archived caches was quite short and disappointing. Finding archived caches through the random chance of it being in a profile one happens to look at doesn't really cut it in this case either, the one that gets missed would be the one that causes a problem with a park manager (Murphy's Law still works when you least need it too). Since Sissy-n-CR participates in this thread, the cache (GC26AC) in Santee SP is one that I found through someone else's find list that I wonder about. That whole state park system treats caching well with three good active caches in that same park, so I hope we aren't littering there. I'm not saying Sissy-n-CR is responsible, but it's a cache that they have found in the past, that makes a good example of what I'm talking about, because it was archived by an admin based on the hider's refusal to acknowledge a maintance request. Just in case anyboby wonders, I go back through the archived caches that I have found to check for additional problems from time to time. The one I mentioned in the first paragraph has been the only one I have found so far. There are three recently archived that I'm going to make time for in the next couple months for a revisit.

I'm a little concerned about the sheriff's threat to bill the cacher for his own response. I think there was a case out west (CA or OR, it was discussed once upon a time on this board) involving a cache that was placed on NFS land but too close to a railroad tunnel. Someone on a train saw the cache being replaced and called in his suspicions. Several other trains were stopped, a bomb squad was called, overtime and extra crews for the delayed trains were called, and the cache hider was billed for all of it, both the law enforcement response and all of the private railroad companies' expenses. I'm not even sure if they blew that one up, but the hider still had to go to court, listen to a judge pontificate about whatever he didn't like in that deal (note that this was before any GC.com rules about caches near railroads were in place; I think this was the incident that caused that rule to be written by GC.com), and shell out the fines. In this case, geocachers didn't do anything wrong. We didn't violate anyone's rules. The cache was on private property with the owner's permission. I would really be concerned if either cacher is required to pay for the sheriff's overreaction, or if they even attempt to bill a geocacher for this debacle. Just a side note. Mahan was unopposed in 2002. He's listed as a Republican (I suspect that will be a disappointment for half of us and amusing to the other half). I couldn't find any reference to the length of his term, nor when he was due to stand for reelection.

Orienteering isn't an Olympic sport yet, but we're trying. Orienteering is in the World Games (held every four years, one year after the Olympics; it's an Olympic-style festival for sports that are working toward inclusion in the Olympics). For the Olympics themselves, the last I heard was that orienteering needed to be established, with National Governing Bodies and National Championships, in 75 countries. The country count is in the mid-50s currently. Getting the country count up only allows consideration for inclusion into the Olympics. There are some political factors within the Olympics that are making it difficult to add anything to the Olympic program currently. The current political trend is toward shrinking the Olympics by eliminating sports and limiting the fields of the sports that remain. It helps to have big money sponsors and/or to have women play the sport while almost naked (both of which cover the additions of beach volleyball and triathalon, not that we in orienteering are bitter ).

Any ideas for those of us who are getting our info one cache at a time from the list, rather than downloading information en masse to a GPSr? I'd like to propose that the weekly update that we are emailled list the archived caches as well as the new caches. Getting one last look to know why a cache was archived in our area has some value. Unless the cache is on our watch list (or recorded in your GPSr memory as some of you have described, but not everyone in this hobby owns a GPSr), we'll not even be able to find the cache listing again to know what happened.