Ladybug Kids

Two cents' worth from a relative newbie (71 finds, 2 DNFs): The DNF can be very important for another reason. Weather and road conditions can be highly variable over the course of just 20 miles this time of year and seeing a DNF for a cache in the hills because the road had been snowed in kept me from loading my family into the truck to go look for one up here in Fairbanks, AK, three weeks ago. We don't have regular road reports available for all the unmaintained roads up here, so the cache log served as our grapevine. One the other hand, while on vacation in New York last month, I used a series of DNFs for a microcache in the woods as a challenge to find what hadn't been found recently. We went into the cache with a agreement that if we didn't find it after a reasonable amount of time due to previous DNFs, we'd bail on it as well. It turned out that we found in just five minutes to log the first find in over four months. Our logged find was followed up by several other finds in quick succession, so it appears a find after several DNFs triggered additional interest in the cache. We've just started placing caches and we certainly would like to see all activity associated with folks looking for them. More activity logged (whether the cache was found or not), especially as we continue the long slide into the cold dark winter of Interior Alaska will keep me motivated to keep placing caches. Finally, I had an experience with an FTF where it was obvious another team had been all over the area (footprints in 3" of new snow) of the posted coordinates ahead of me, but there was no posted log. After an hour of gradually becoming the human snowball and progressively getting later for work, I walked back to the car, reread the hint, and spotted the likely cache location more than 100 yards from the posted coordinates. I successfully logged the FTF and sent the cache owner a set of coordinates from my GPSr that were subsequently posted on the cache page. Given that the cache was an ammo box, a DNF on an FTF attempt might have alerted the cache owner there was a problem with the coordinates. I know if I had seen a DNF, I would have approached the search differently.