MapheadMike

I've found all of mine without a GPS. Here are some thoughts. The main one is to forget plotting coords manually (unless you are really, really looking forward to the act of manually plotting coords). Topozone (linked on each cache page), and Lostoutdoors.com/Map Maker will plot the cache coordinates accurately in WGS-84, which is the standard that geocaching uses. Topozone's advantage is that it's one click from the cache page. Lostoutdoors' advantages are that it offers both topo maps and aerial photos. The map images can by copied and pasted into a document program and then scaled and cropped. And you can plot multiple points onto a Lostoutdoors map, which will let you put several nearby caches on the same map. A large number of caches are placed in developed areas where the aerial photo will help more than the topo map. As you learn the hobby, you'll be able to tell which product will help in what situations. Other geocachers might have other map products that they like, but IMO, Lostoutdoors is the best for geocaching, by far.

If a cache owner has their act together (checking maps and records to ABSOLUTELY KNOW who owns the land and what the landowner's policies are), then it would be a simple matter to document this to a site volunteer and have the cache reinstated. Possibly even documenting it in advance through reviewer notes or in the cache description, if the situation isn't crystal clear at first glance. This presumes that a false land ownership claim is the only issue. In this case, we also have a veiled threat of violence ("chewed up by dogs" - which happen to be dobermans and rotweillers). That seems to be a legit problem, even if the underlying land claim is false. That also justifies quick action of Groundspeak's part. The cache owner seems to agree. She stated in her regional forum that she isn't replacing the cache based on the dog threats, even though the county land records that I found yesterday show that the land ownership claim is likely false.

Djwini says that Plan C for Milwaukee can handle TBs, so Candles In The Wind replaces the now archived The Best Laid Plans. It happens to be a little closer to the track. At least one TB made it to The Best Laid Plans and that visit will remain on the score sheet.

That's the key difference. This dog owner is not controling his dog within his own property. This dog owner is (you say "warning" - I say "threatening") that an attack may happen along a public trail. The map work I did this evening shows that the parcel in question is owned by a corporation, not a local homeowner. Even if there is something in the trail/recreational easement that would disallow a geocache (BSnat brought up this possibility), I'm quite sure that the neighbor is still wrong to threaten to sic his dogs on hikers using land that doesn't belong to him. As far as the specific cache: I just looked at the local forum and the cache owner is going to pull the cache, based on the threats by the neighbor. That's a valid decision. Unfortunately, it means that the threats worked and some jerk effectively stole a 17 acre parcel/trail easement from the rest of his community.

I suspect the fact that no answer was provided by Fly46 means she's given up on administering this race. Has anyone recieved any private correspondence on this matter that contradicts this? Fortunately, the dollar amount was low, so the lesson isn't that painful. Is anyone curious enough to write the #45 bunch to see if anything was sent to Adam's place? These are my first travel bugs and they are still circulating and making decent progress. I think at least 2/3 of the TBs involved are still active. I intend to keep racing and playing. I would hope that others who entered the TB race feel likewise. I am not going to assume responsibility for any tangible prizes nor for anything else fly46 might have promised, but I might take some time over the next few weeks to assemble a web page with an up-to-date score sheet and try to keep it going for the duration. I haven't done that much with web pages, so this'll be a chance to try something new. Unless anyone objects, I'll also declare that BALLS - BIRDS & the Village of Homestead replaces the now archived Bay Look Out Point as the Homestead goal cache. It's an easy multi a couple of miles NW of the track. I'm going to contact a cache owner to see if a certain small cache in Milwaukee is big enough to accomodate TBs and declare that change soon too. And despite the way that the race is dragging on, I'm sticking with the original concept of single designated caches near the tracks. Comments from the other participants?

I got curious and did some of the research that the OP could have been doing in lieu of the war of words that she decided to fight (and fortunately lose). Riverside County's GIS shows the cache on parcel 153-250-001. The owner is not listed by name online, but the mailing address goes to National Property Tax Management, Inc., a company that handles property tax matters on behalf of their client corporations. I find it unlikely that a corporation large enough to need the services of a company such as NPTMI would resort to threatening hikers with rotweillers and dobermans. IMO, The steps that the cache owner should take are: 1. Double check to make sure the city/county really has an agreement with the true landowner to allow public recreational access, such as the horse trail. Based on the signage in the photos, I suspect that such an agreement might really exist. 2. Make a report of the incident to the county sheriff department. Have them serve Groundspeak for info if neccesary. Some dunderhead has threatened geocachers (and presumably hikers, horse riders, and other recreation users) with violent dogs, for accessing land that is (apparently) open to the public. That needs to be stopped regardless of the specific cache.

More from Murphy: The privacy you had when you retrieved that urban cache won't be there when it's time to replace it.

I just looked. It looks like that geocaching bills are taken out of the overall site statistics and record lists, but they are still tracked just like any other bill, and they still show up in the individual user's stat pages. I've seen no difference in the site since the owner there tightened his rules against geocaching bills, except for the labeling of the geocaching bills themselves.

Most regions have a local geocachers group of some sort (some with seperate website and meetings, others just a yahoogroup) that you can contact for assistance. You might want to use the regional forums on this site to call out to such a group. If this is the park and treasure that I'm hoping it is (Explore Park in Roanoke with a event based on the Beale Treasure), you might also want to contact some letterboxers. Letterboxing uses text clues, which fits the method of the Beale Treasure a bit better than numerical coordinates. I actually had a series of letterboxes planned based on the Beale Treasure. But the first letterbox in the planned series was destoryed in a small forest fire, so I took that as a sign not to continue.

My experience is that Google Earth (and Google Maps) is that it's very inconsistent. Some regions are presented in WGS-84, others in NAD-27, and some parts are "fudged" somewhere in between. The road maps seem OK and consistent in WGS-84 and I've had a little bit of success looking at a hybrid image (road map overlayed onto the aerial photo), seeing the potential error (if the road overlays are off by 30 meters to the east, then the cache location mark may also be off 30 meters to the east), and estimating the true cache position from there. It's a good product for a general overview, but it won't be all that helpful for finding caches until the inconsistencies are fixed.

Archived caches are not supposed to still be in the field (the exception is if the cache listing is merely transfered to another listing site, but the owner would mention that in the archive note). If you find the remnants of an archived cache in the field, it is litter and you should clean it. Leaving geo-litter in the field is among the biggest fouls a geocacher can commit and we as a community should take all possible steps to prevent such occurences. While it's possible to adopt an archived cache, it is usually better to simply clean the archived cache litter and place a new cache from scratch. If the cacher in question is planning to leave the caches in the field, he should allow someone else to adopt them. Otherwise, he should remove them and archive them. Every other course of action is grossly irresponsible. Unless there are some very unusual circumstances, there is nothing to prevent anyone from visiting the lat/long of an old cache location. Just find the coords by finding the old listing and have a happy hike. But if there is still a cache container there, it should be actively (not archived) listed (here or a competitor site), or cleaned as litter. Edited to fix grammar.

Snoogans = 6 listings, no cheats GPSax = 1 listing, no cheats

With the discrepancies among the various notes in this thread (the site I found through Google is still up and running, yet the one Vargseld is working on isn't, per his note), I would wonder if there are two (or more) spoiler sites that need to be defended against. Vargseld, you might want to send the site you discovered to Keystone by PM (since no one wants to give these sites more attention by naming them publicly) to see if it's the same one that "Groundspeak and its volunteer team have been aware of ... for quite some time".

Be careful with the Terraserver Viewer. I've tested it with some familiar caches and everything comes up in NAD-27. You have to use the jeeep.com utility to convert the WGS-84 cache coords to NAD-27 to get an accurate mark on the Terraserver Viewer. Once given converted coords, it seems to work decently. Since lostoutdoors works with WGS-84 coords in the first place, it's easier to stick with them and not mess with the conversions.

I use lostoutdoors to do all my caching. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of other map and photo sites, but it's deadly accurate.

Latest developments in the race: fishhook1's Martin Truex Jr. TB has won the first part of the TB race by holding a three lap lead (would have been four laps if it weren't for the drop-n-grab in Indy) on the day of the 2005 Nextel Cup season's last race. Congrats! Your man sure made his real race for the Busch championship exciting. Wasn't that the 2nd or 3rd time this season where his front tire changer left lugnuts loose and caused a extra green flag pit stop? Truex is still the only TB through Dover, Loudon, and Watkins Glen. Four opponents have made it through Bristol. Ten more (15 total) have gotten through Darlington. Mears has the two California tracks visited out of order, while Wallace made an out-of-order visit to Milwaukee. I think that's it for the track visits. Goal caches: The Homestead cache is now archived. As a replacement, BALLS - BIRDS & the Village of Homestead seems to be the closest to the track. The Infenion cache is still disabled. Tolay Creek Cache seems well established a couple miles away. The Dover cache just had its second DNF with no finds since August. It's a fairly easy cache that did have logs from muggles in it when I found it, so a theft is possible. Silver lake stroll is a new cache that's closer to the track. Those are some possible backup plans if we need to go to them. I hope all is well at the Fly46 trap.

I thought he geocached under the name "WaldenRun".

First, log your find. You found it, didn't you? I think there are several reasons to do this. One, it'll give the curious out-of-towners a link though your stats page to see the cache in question. Two, there are some cache owners who would ignore a random email but would react to a find log on the cache page. If they don't react to a find made several months after they archived the cache, then that's more evidence that they are really gone and the cache was abandoned to rot. Three, you found it and you really do deserve +1 for doing so. All geocache containers placed in the field are either listed (somewhere), being processed for listing (somewhere), or litter. There is no gray area in this. Unless someone produces a link to the relevant listing on some other site (unlikely, someone would have done it already if such a listing existed), you can safely presume that this one is litter. Whether you remove the litter by carrying the container out of the field or convert it from litter to a valid listing is up to you. If you think Jamie Z has a valid concern about the same container implying it's the same cache, then carry a fresh container to the location and recycle the abandoned container as a new cache in a different park. Otherwise, you can use the original container, if you want to. In the overall scheme, this is an incredibly minor point. Adopting the previous listing or creating a new listing is also your choice and another minor one at that. With the original listing archived, it does seem easier go with a new listing. IMO, leaving geo-litter is as big a foul as stealing caches. We huff and puff about CITO, but some of us can't pick up our own toys after we've finished playing with them. Sooner or later, some ranger is going to find a cache that someone left to rot in a circumstance similar to this and we are going to lose access somewhere because of it. You had the good fortune/misfortune of finding this piece of geo-litter and seem willing to do something about it. Presuming you follow through, please accept my thanks for handling this piece of geo-litter, one way or the other.

Article #1 and Article #2. It's not as historically significant as Arlington, but this isn't an ordinary graveyard. It looks like there are plenty of historians and historic buffs in that area that want it cleaned up too. I think the OP should join with the historic crowd and put some pressure on Home Depot to get it clean like they promised. The historians would probably appreciate some extra support, but you do risk that the historians will judge that a geocache is inappropriate in the cemetery as well, no matter the intentions to attract cachers to this piece of history. Ask our friends in South Carolina how that works.

This letterbox is still in that same rest area. So if you take KBer up on the offer, see where this is (a little further in the woods than KBer's cache was, maybe 30-35 yards from his spot) and consider giving it some space (12-15 yards should be enough) to avoid any confusion, hijackings, or other discourtesies between the two hobbies.

There's the verbage we agreed to last winter. As long as this race has taken, I'm actually neutral on this. If no one else wants to bother to protest, I'll go along. How tightly do the rest of the competitors feel like holding to this? We did hold a different cacher to this with some TBs going into Darlington (April 1 posts on page 8 and 9 of this thread). The Kasey Kahne TB made an out-of-order, drop-n-grab visit to Indy (same cacher, same circumstance) that would also be affected. The Infenion cache is disabled and probably missing. Is anyone close enough warrant a substitution or can we wait a bit to see if it's replaced? There is a good cache about a mile SE of the track if we need it.

Do a keyword search using "Ceips" and all the past discussion will come up. Ceips is the state rep who instigated the effort against us.

I just browsed the list of 135 finds and didn't see the locationless icon in there. So that's the missing one.

My advice is to not bother with the conversions. Some online utilities/sites/programs can do it for you. In the US, Topozone and LostOutdoors.com/Map Maker both plot the coords accurately in WGS-84, which is the standard everyone uses in geocaching. Topozone is linked on every US cache page. LostOutdoors.com is not linked on these cache pages, but you can type (or copy/paste) the coords as shown (dd<space>mm.mmm), this site offers both topo maps and aerial photos, and their images can be cut, pasted, and scaled into good word processing programs. There are a couple of other sites and programs that others have had success with in generating maps good enough to find caches with as well.

It seems to me that there should be some consideration of the fact that geocachers will be using their GPS to navigate during the event. That should be an obvious difference from a concert, etc. As an orienteer, I can tell you that, regardless of the involvement of an orienteering club, GPS-Orienteering does not occur unless it's organized by a geocacher for geocachers. Like letterboxing, the crossover interest really is limited despite obvious similarities and orienteers who don't also geocache just aren't going to envision or organize a course with numerical coordinates. It's not just GPS users. Except for one annual novelty event (this year President's Day Monday in FDR SP, GA) to help out the CIOR (international competition for military reservists) team, orienteers don't normally do too much with UTM grid maps either.