SpaceGamer

The location sounds great to me. I have a cache in a similar situation and it has some unique maintenance challenges. Kids will find it and they will come to visit it often for fun. This is especially true if it becomes the sample used for a school geocaching program. Valuable swag, trackables and sometimes the container will disappear. Kids that trade will often leave things like crayons and candy that melt and leave messes to clean up. The logs are rewarding, but it has been an experience.

The State Geocaching program in West Virginia is launching a series of caches at haunted locations later this month. You can find information on the event page. http://coord.info/GC33CMZ

There is definately a subset in this game that really enjoy what I call the Urban Spy aspect. When I first got into it, it was a thrill knowing that there were all these hidden caches out there that all the normal people did not have any idea about. The first few urban hides I found had this spy movie like quality of trying to get them without being seen and giving away the location. It's exciting. A couple years later, that feeling has faded, but it's still there for me sometimes. When it happens, it makes me feel young again. The real issue is adequate permission. I would probably not report this person, unless the cache looked like a bomb or something. It's not posted no tresspassing. It's a public enough place where pedestrians passing through would be okay. The CO most likely knows the owners well enough to be able to apologise convincingly should something happen. It falls just on the far side of what I would call adequate, but within the grey area that I can live with. I would probably not place a cache like this, but I would probably look for it if I was in the area with a few minutes to spare and needed a caching fix. In a strictly legalistic view, it violates the guidelines. Most people, however are not strictly legalistic. To my mind this is the geocaching equivalent to driving 5 MPH over the speed limit. It's technically illegal, but everyone around here does it anyway because they are not going to get pulled over for it.

Sometimes they do, but they get stolen (often by accident) I used to buy those short little gel pens for my caches, but they go missing a lot. In the last two weeks, I had one of my pens removed from a cache in a swag trade. I consider this karma for the time I arrived at home after a caching run and noticed I had a pen from one of my finds that morning. Almost everyone has unconscious habits when it comes to carrying writing implements. Pens and pencils migrate, it's part of their nature. I did have a situation where I was a quarter mile down a trail and found that there were no pens in my caching bag. I did have a lighter that I removed from an ammo can some time ago. I burned a twig and signed with the ash on the end. For my caches, I do audit my logs, but I would allow a find if they had taken a picture or they have some knowledge of the hide that was not on the cache page. Cachers tend to be a pretty honorable group around here, so it's not been much of a problem.

That happens sometimes. Most just replace the container. Agreeing to keep it in good shape is part of the requirements for publishing one. If they keep getting stolen, it's probably a bad spot and you can archive the cache and move it elsewhere.

WVangler, who placed the cache, has been very helpful. I'm sure that if you sent him an e-mail through his profile link he would be willing to let you know.

There is a local cache to me that has copies of the keys attached to three different travel bugs. Any one of them will open the cache. It is a fun cache and the page is set up nicely to have status displays for the travel bugs with keys. It recently had a situation where the lock was cut by a muggle. The maintainer had to go and replace the keys on the travel bugs to match the new lock. It's a fun setup, but it creates interesting maintenance situations if you do not have a ready supply of matching locks and keys. http://coord.info/GC2BNRZ

This acronym is a regional one. EGG is a common acronym in my area. As mentioned above, it's an Easy Grab Guardrail cache. They are usually tucked into the openings in the end of a guardrail.

In West Virginia, the ExploreWV challenge is active now, The link is http://www.wvcommerce.org/travel/thingstod...wv/default.aspx You should add the Black Walnut Geotrail http://sites.google.com/site/blackwalnutgeotrail/home

Who voted that one in? No idea, but seeing as how there is no precedent in cache placement, maybe a president out ranks that.

You could possibly arrange it as a challenge cache with a CITO theme. I have seen photographic requirements on a few challenge caches.

The form used to estimate the difficulty of a cache has the language, "Cache may be very well hidden, may be multi-leg, or may use clues to location" which raises the difficulty to a three. In my area the norm is to consider the difficulty of the challenge into the rating, then list the difficulty of the actual cache in the cache description.

I was looking for this kind of information when I decided to start placing caches. There are a number of great parks locally that did not have caches. I ended up having to do the research the hard way. After digging out the information I discovered that the park I was looking at had had several caches stolen over the years. I decided against placing a cache there and went with another park that had a much better record. Short version, with a little history, you can try to engineer your caches to last longer. You could also use the information to track down caches that have been abandoned to help with geolitter.

I will log a DNF once I have enough time to actually search long enough to satisfy myself that I can't find it. I have this internal sense of "OK, I'm done." and use it to determine when I post a log. I am usually searching on lunch breaks, so it can take a couple visits to actually reach this point. Now when I am searching on a weekend or during a FTF search on a tough hide I will post a log for every visit to GZ. If I cannot make it to GZ due to muggles, I try to post a note. All this is subject to me remembering to do so, of course.

Having the actual GPS coordinates on the brick would be awesome for the first stage of a multi. You would just want to make really sure the cache is going to be at those coordinates for a long time.