Mike & Jess

We had a great time at the event. This was our first maga event, and the first camp out for Cohen, our young geocacher. Even with the rain, Cohen stayed reasonably dry in the backpack carrier, and even managed to catch a nap during the GSAK seminar (there is a photo of him napping in the GC event page photo gallary). We will be at the next event for sure. Thank you COG for the great event.

60 caches is just over 1/4 the caches available in our city. Must be nice. To the OP, Don't get frustrated with the first few DNF caches. Once you get a few finds under your belt, you will notice how caches are hidden in your area, and you will have a lot more luck. Each area has it's own style of cache hides. Here in Sudbury, it is pretty easy for our family to find every cache we go looking for (~95% find rate), as we know the local hiding methods and patterns. When we travel and cache, tend to run into a lot more DNF caches, or longer searches, as the types of caches, and the methods they are hidden are different. I would have to guess, our find rate is ~65-75% on the road.

I have a newer GPS (Oregon 300), but I do run into issues in some areas. My favorite is the tall, second growth forests. These are forests planted in perfect grid formation, where you can bushwack without getting off the mtn bike. These forests drive the GPS (and myself) nuts. What I found works, is to do a clover leaf pattern. Get as close as you can to ground zero, take note of where you are standing, then do another pass. This generally reduces the search area to a smaller area. This works pretty well in almost all situations.

We'll be looking at doing a bike/hike Geocaching event next spring here in Sudbury. The area in question is all bush. The caches will be places along, and off of one of the local ski-doo trails. There is ~6 easy access areas to the trail. This will allow for those of us that can bike, the bike it end to end. Those that can't bike the entire thing (~10km one way) can go in, cache, travel to the next access area, go in, cache, etc. The area also has a low density of caches, so all the caches we place for this event will be permanents, registered GC caches. The event will be listed as put on my Up North Tracks (should make it easier to find). We had hoped to put it on this year, but our schedule is really busy with events this year (attending, and/or vendor's table).

The funny thing with this areas is that I have an unrestricted area less then a 5 minute walk from my house. If someone was willing to sponsor or spot me the materials, I would go for it. In case you are wondering, it is 10 minute walk to my office, which is right downtown.

I think 3-4 caches per sq km within city limits would be nice. With the amount of bush we have here, it would still mean a 45min to 1 hour hike (depending on terrain) with the family. I do enjoy the harder, hike in caches, but these are not that good when I bring my friend's girls with me. My little guy doesn't mind, but the girls get tire.

The problem we are running into here is most of us are hitting a wall around the 150-175 mark. With the amount of bush we have here, it is pretty safe to say more then half are 10+ minute walk from where you park. In the report I ran, 3 areas had 6-8 caches per km, and the rest where 2 caches and 1 per km, making geocaching more of a driving excercise then a hiking one.

I had ran a density report using GSAK of my local area (Sudbury Ontario) and found that we had a couple areas that had 5-8 caches per sq km. Most are 2 or 1 cache per sq km. I had posted a comment about this low density to a group of local geocachers, and someone asked about what would be considered saturated, and what would be optimal? What do you guys think? I would have to guess that we are looking at ~20sq km of highly populated city, and the rest is bush.

I was just wondering if there is anyone based in Sudbury that is into GeoCaching on mountain bike.

Is there a way to obtain data for offline use from GeoCaching.com? We do regular trips across country from Northern Ontario to Nova Scotia. What I would love to have, is data (i.e. CSV file) that I can import into Google Earth or Map Point on the laptop. With the GPS attached to the laptop, I can track where we are on the map, but would love to see GeoCaches listed as well. The data I am looking for is not the whole GeoCache coordinate system. If I could obtain lists from Lon/Lat X to Lon/Lat Y would be good. Mike