bigeddy

Nice swag! Funny that a cache put out for dogs by a cat was found first by ferrets. Coincidentally, I visited a 3-cache series today involving about a 6-mile walk in the desert and each cache (ammo cans in rocks) contained dog treats. A couple of the cache logs mentioned that their dog appreciated it.

A reasonable argument in general. But I'm thinking of local caches put out by experienced cachers who know one another. It would be presumptuous of me to remove the treats especially since I have not seen any harm done by them. I did remove some treats from one of my own caches that wasn't an ammo can (I've never seen an ammo can breached by an animal although I'm sure a bear could do it if there were any left around here). The dog treats I have come across in caches are fairly neutral--I can barely smell them--whereas human treats tend to be like candy, gum or, at best, expired energy bars (ugh). I routinely remove food and other items that can cause a mess but, in my experience, most dog treats are quite durable unless exposed to moisture--not generally a problem where I live. So, I don't recommend that people put dog treats in caches but at least in my area it is not the forbidden item it may be elsewhere. A slightly different take on heaven, I guess.

Group photos show that geocachers are a fairly typical cross-section of body types and ages. I don't think it was always that way. Early on most geocaches were a box in the woods which required some hiking, and geocachers tended to be active outdoors people in somewhat better shape than the average person. As geocaching broadened (pun intended) it brought in less physically active people who seek and hide easier caches. I know some geocachers with big numbers--both finds and body fat--who rarely venture more than a few hundred feet from their car. This reflects the ongoing obesity epidemic caused primarily by people driving everywhere and eating too much high-calorie junk. Geocaching, for its part, at least gets people out and provides some opportunity for exercise. I hope that all the recent diabetes travel bugs are making people think about their weight and the sad realization that this is the first generation where the parents may outlive their children. As for whether geocaching is a sport, it can be. Competitive people make it so. Just watch them race to be FTF to the most difficult caches or take on challenge cache series. I generally call geocaching a game because it pits me against muggles, clever hiders, would-be finders, and variable conditions. Most geocachers treat it as a casual hobby, though, which is good to keep in mind when we discuss guidelines and techniques. Personally, I prefer caches of around 2.5 to 3.5 terrain rating, but I've done my share of both easier and harder caches.

Interesting question from a cat! There are many dog oriented caches on the public lands around where I live. Dog biscuits and greenies are fairly common contents. I have not seen or heard of any problems with them. The cache owners typically use sturdy ammo cans and hide the caches in places where animals are unlikely to get at them. I understand the general need to avoid food in caches. I have come across several trashed containers where people had left candy. My general policy is to remove food if I find it. That said, I don't object to packaged dog treats because they seem relatively harmless and the dogs love them. This is one of those guidelines where we need to apply common sense.

The flash mob cache was an interesting and unique (for us) break from the usual meet-and-greet. Although it was staged as a distinctly local event, a few people came from other cities and we even attracted out-of-state visitors passing through. Definitely fun. It's good to mix things up. We did the potluck dinner social last month. Next month we have a campout. A well-staged quickie this month fit in nicely and people were grinning despite the rain.

My ignore list is over 300 items and includes 3 people whose caches I avoid as well as certain types of caches. (Side thought: how big can a bookmark list get?) The problem I see is that an ignore list (or bookmark list) is not a filter per se, it's just a static list with little more than cache names and optional comments. There are no owner names attached to the records. Of course, it functions somewhat like a filter on local searches. Maybe Groundspeak could add the ability to create multiple ignore lists, and one of the list options would be all caches placed by a given owner? We can already search for all caches placed by a user, so it would seem easy enough to allow that to be converted into an ignore list. If they could make updating the list automatic, all the better.

Gosh, your join date predates mine by several months! Good to see you're still at it and having a good time--I assume. It's good to have this discussion regularly, much like we stop to examine our progress on a difficult cache hunt. There has been some improvement since a year ago in terms of refined guidelines and better tools to handle ongoing cache inflation. Still, the phrase, "Too much of a good thing," comes to mind. I'm pretty geeky and yet the sheer volume of caches is overwhelming. The increasing amount of "noise" results in me looking to other GPS games and mostly avoiding these forums. Two related trends that continue to bear watching are the high proportion of micro (and sub-micro) containers and caches put in places they shouldn't be. Among all the changes, these two may have the greatest negative effect on the game. The caching community, if that term can be used meaningfully, is larger and more prominent. It includes more "professionals"--as opposed to the many addicts--those who by choice spend much of their time playing or working the game. You know an activity has changed when a few people start making money at it.

Not at all. A flash event is just something a little different and fun to do. It can be looked at like a 15-minute cache hunt where you happen to run into a bunch of other cachers. Or you can use it as a meeting point to head out caching or go to lunch with friends. This current group of events has the added dimension of being synchronized so we can compare photos and stories at many locations.

Oregon Geocaching is a long-standing website, not an organization, although many of us use it to post events, talk about issues, spread information, and all the other things a formal organization does. Besides a forum it has an area to log Oregon Geocoins. Most members are from Central Oregon although we welcome geocachers throughout the state and beyond. We have links to a half-dozen other regional sites in Oregon.

The point of "discovering?" Many people want to fill their trackables page with numbers and icons, and discovering is an effortless way of doing that. To be sure there a few special situations where discovering can be used to properly manage a trackable item but for the vast majority it's about the numbers. Trackables are a branch of the game that has grown and diverged to the point that it has little to do with geocaching. They have nothing to do with navigation or the GPS and often don't even involve caches. Some of them, especially the custom coins, are fun if you can get your hands on one. The problem is that in the numbers frenzy people do strange things such as the aforementioned event list. Indeed, a primary activity of events these days is to log as many trackables in one night as it used to take a year to find and move. It is especially hard to know what to do with trackables these days, as they have morphed into a confusing item that can be a collectable, signature item, travel bug, promotion or some combination. Consequently, people generally ignore an item's goal (assuming it has one) and treat it as swag, sometimes not even logging it. To avoid losing their trackable item, some owners never let them out of sight but will bring them to events for people to discover. Other owners are frustrated when their traveling trackables get swallowed up at events and generate scores of "discovered" logs or disappear into someone's collection. What a strange game it's become.

Difficulty and terrain are the two primary cache ratings. There are other variables such as weather which can mix things up. One of the easiest ways to make most caches a lot more challenging is to do them at night. You play with the terrain you have. In the west we are fortunate to have varied landscape and large public lands. If your area is flat and mostly private land, use the excuse to travel. Research places with 3+ terrain caches and plan an all-day or overnight trip. I bet there are many such caches not too far away. Difficulty, as opposed to terrain, is up to the cache owner and can involve things like camo, puzzles, navigation calculations, multi-stages, or extensive preparation. It sounds like the cache hiders in your local area like to keep it simple. Again, you may have seek out the closest 3+ difficulty caches and make a point of traveling to them. One thing you might consider is to attempt the highest rated cache in each of the counties (or other jurisdictions) of your state. Guaranteed that will keep you busy planning trips and seeing new places. I did that last year for my state, Oregon, and it was challenging and fun. I walked away with a better appreciation for where I live.

If I download a geocache or benchmark LOC file from a search page and try to import it into a navigation application, the XML parser rejects it. Apparently, the file generated by Groundspeak using EasyGPS produces invalid code. The problem is that the XML attribute values aren't quoted. Attributes must be quoted in XML even if they don't contain spaces. This happens in two places: <loc version=1.0 src=EasyGPS> <waypoint> <link text=Benchmark Details>http://www.whatever.com/</link> </waypoint> </loc> This should actually be: <loc version="1.0" src="EasyGPS"> <waypoint> <link text="Benchmark Details">http://www.whatever.com/</link> </waypoint> </loc> Is it possible for Groundspeak to create valid XML? Thanks.

Counting Counties in Oregon has been a year-long competition to visit the highest-rated caches (excluding micros and virtuals) in Oregon's 36 counties. That is like doing a monsterous multi-cache of 36+ stages (some of the individual cache are multis and puzzles) over 98,000 square miles. Several of the caches are rated 5/5 although probably only a couple are true to their rating. The maximum possible "score" is 302 (8.4 points per cache on average), achieved by one cacher so far, PMOGUY, although tomfuller is within a half-point and working. A caching couple, Tbird2LM, also did them all but were not able to count ones done before 2006. A suppose the next logical steps are to do the most difficult cache in each state and then in each country.

All directions are relative so the answer depends on your purpose. There is no such thing as "true" north. What we call True North, Geographic North or Map North is just a standard way of making maps. Magnetic North refers to a moving dipole in the earth. And then there is Astronomical North which relates to the moving axis of rotation of the earth. Because I used a compass long before the GPS, I find Magnetic North easier to use in the field. When I had paper topo maps, I would draw the magnetic lines on them. Orienteering maps already point to Magnetic North so that you do not have to fuss with declination. Note, though, that the earth's poles move over time and so does the declination at a given location. Many topo maps date to the 60's when the declination where I live was nearly 4 degrees greater than at present (20 versus 16). Big difference for precise navigation! I have done many offset caches and multi-caches with projected coordinates using both True and Magnetic. They are great fun and more interesting to me than puzzle caches that have nothing to do with navigation. For caches either True or Magnetic are fine but the cache description should say clearly which is used.

I've been dealing with this topic a lot recently while doing a series of the "most difficult," meaning highest rated, caches in my state. Based on a potential 10 points maximum (5/5 rating) for each cache, I have so far completed 27 of the caches for 176 points or about 6.5 points per cache. Some other people are averaging around 8 points a cache. I think I am pretty good at rating caches and have been aware that many cache ratings seemed off. This exercise has really pointed out to me how bad it is. By my own evaluation a third of these caches are off by 3 or more points. Ratings are a fine point of the game that many players, including some experienced ones, do not understand.

Another factor is that the data source such as Navteq provides different levels of verification depending on the customer's needs and budget. The best and most expensive data are verified as described on the ground by someone driving it but the customer can get data where many roads are only partially verified if at all. I've discovered numerous errors and omissions many years old in current navigation systems because the roads have evidently never been checked. As far as Garmin's v8 goes, I see from their on-line preview maps that the data on major roads in my city is from about 18 months ago. That's before the previous version! Their lead time to process the data must be over a year.

Ugh. How long does it take to load a 1GB card? I take it Garmin replaced most of the internal memory with the card, so that if we buy one of their preloaded cards then we have to swap cards to use different map products: shut unit down, open back, change out card, close back, start up unit, lose micro-card in pocket--what a hassle!

A 1GB card will hold a lot of maps! But can you load and delete them individually? It would be a major drag if MapSource still deleted the entire map set before loading a new one.

That doesn't sound good. I was hoping that with the microSD card Garmin had abandoned the destructive-write process of loading maps. Does loading maps on the card delete all the maps already on it?

I'd guess Howard Heights (GC894B) in the Wallowa's at 8237'. There have been a couple of caches near the top of 10,358' South Sister but they were removed. Are you bagging high caches?

Various reasons including not having the time, not knowing exactly where I will be when I want to cache, or spontaneous caching when I find myself with a little spare time. As a fallback I have tried looking up nearby caches on the WAP interface when we happen to stop somewhere but I am often hurled back the myriad micros and puzzle caches that clutter up the list. The GC response time is generally Ok. What I am referring to is the time it takes to specify a useful query (or usually a series of queries because there are too many caches for just one), retrieving them from email, feeding them into another program for examination, and then downloading the waypoints into both a PDA and a GPS receiver. That's a lot of work and I still haven't done the time consuming (but more interesting) part of reading the cache descriptions and logs. I don't find the Google Maps very good, their aerials are often useless where I live, and exporting queries adds more steps and apps. Furthermore, Google don't play entirely well on my laptop. Streets and Trips is Windows only (I use the Mac OS and sometimes use MacGPS Pro or National Geographic TOPO for mapping). The other option is to use Google straight from the cache pages but then there is no filtering and it displays only a handful of the cache glut. GSAK is Windows-only. By poor data I mean that caches often give misleading information about type, size, ratings or attributes. By rough search criteria I mean that the query parameters are hit-and-miss and sometimes contradict one another. For example, I generally don't like micros but will hunt them under certain circumstances if the location and hiding style are right, but if I exclude micros in the query then I may lose the majority of caches, some of which I want, and some of those I get are in fact micros but miscategorized. A "built in filter?" Yet another application that probably runs only on Windows and requires more learning and fiddling? Yes, there are ways of partially dealing with many thousands of caches if I patch together enough tools and create custom procedures. But I will still run out of time and patience, as well as my receiver's 1000-waypoint limit which fills up at less than 100 miles from home! I already have. It's been over a year since I placed a cache and I've been slowly retiring the ones I have. There are so many new caches there is no reason for me to add to the noise. Mostly I have been trying to help other people improve their caches if they are interested. And playing other navigation games that are not overwhelmed with trashy growth. Besides the rewarding of good caches that you point out, there need to be better search techniques. Picking out appropriate caches should be relatively quick and easy at both home and on the road. What we have now is a disorganized toolbox of limited and technically complicated choices--worthwhile for the power cacher but of limited appeal to most of us. Much room for improvement.

Pocket queries are often mentioned as the answer to cache glut. They are popular with high-volume cachers and work Ok for certain types of searches--primarily those with either narrow criteria or a modest search area. It's great that you can depend on them. I've found that they have many limitations: a. Available only to Premium Members. b. Require access to a computer and internet connection--not generally a problem at home but a challenge on the road. c. Take significant time to set up the query and to download and process many waypoints. d. Not as effective as graphic map searches for routes and scattered locations. e. Often give unsatisfactory results because of poor cache data and rough search criteria. f. Ineffective for simply trying to find a few caches on the spur of the moment. Pocket queries are helpful for researching an area and for a first pass at trip planning. But they are not the answer to every cache question.

Comments on numbers from my perspective as an experienced and jaded cacher: a. Cache Inflation - Like the OP, I also think there are way too many caches and that most of them are of the ho-hum variety. I call it cache inflation. Great for power cachers but a real disincentive for those of us who do just a few caches now and then. Comments pointing to queries, quality or cyclic complaining greatly underestimate the problem. b. Fast-Food Caching - Micros have a direct bearing on this because they are so easy to assemble and hide compared to standard caches. As an example of Micro Spew™, one local cacher threw out 36 nearly identical hides (all film canisters, identical log sheets, even the same cache description) in a small area. Of course, most of the on-line logs are quick cut-and-paste now... "on our 1000 caches-in-a-week vacation. thanks for a great hide!" c. Planning Overload - Pocket queries, bookmarks and Google maps help only if I have access to a computer and the time to weed through the results. Even then it is considerable effort when all I want to do is locate a few appropriate caches. Plus, all these different tools create their own demands when I would rather be doing other things, like actually finding a cache. When the planning takes longer than the hunt I start to lose interest. d. Swiss Army Syndrome - GSAK is fine for processing and organizing large numbers of caches but it requires technical savvy and it runs only under Windows which I don't use. Even if it did run on my platform of choice, it still requires many steps and is overkill for much of what I do. Like any database tool, it is only as good as the data which, unfortunately, are full of omissions, errors and inconsistencies. In the end I still have to read individual cache pages and logs. e. Too Much Technology - PDAs, smart phones and paperless caching work well for some caches but no so well for hunts that involve calculations, complicated instructions, photo hints, poor formatting of the cache page, bad weather, remote areas, low batteries, and aging eyes. I use all the latest technology but sometimes it gets in the way of enjoying the hunt. Plain old paper has its place. f. Spontaneity Lost - Finally, there are the times I am on a trip with the unexpected opportunity to do some caching and I try to research nearby possibilities. This can be frustrating when the majority of caches are one of the 3 M's--micro, mystery or multi--and the real-time search tools require me to scan a long list to pick out appropriate hunts. More times than not I just give up and do something else. Groundspeak's listing system has struggled to keep up with escalating cache numbers. A patchwork of new tools help but have added much complexity to the game. We need more accessible and integrated search techniques that adapt to our individual needs.

Micro Spew

I dont' have a mac to test with but I do use services provided out there that will do a screen capture of the page and send it to you as an image and for some reason it works for me. I'll look some more into it though.. What cache are you looking at? I think your question has been answered by many folks--it affects all caches. What system configuration are these "services provided out there" using that return a complete page with the map to you? I've got several Macs with different OS's and web browsers including the latest versions of Safari, Firefox and OmniWeb and none of them will handle the Google links you are using (with the exception of a developer version of WebKit and a beta version of OmniWeb on OS X 10.4.6 only). And it is not just a blank box that is displayed; in some configurations I get various annoying error messages. As another user mentioned, the new maps also do not work with the Treo 650's web browser which I often use in the field. So, it is not just Macs. If you have no Macs (or Treos) yourself to test, you could let beta testers try out major changes before they are put up on the main site. Even then it would be nice to give people a choice of map displays through preferences because there will always be many users with older systems.