2skidivers

We have been geocaching for 10 years. When we started, a Geocache was an ammo can with nice trade items. They usually required a hike to get to them. Jeep used to be a sponsor and gave out Jeep Travel Bugs that were prize finds. (These have all but disappeared since people kept them.) There were some very cleaver hides and puzzles to solve and themes for the trade items. Caches were placed in interesting containers. Multi stage caches were placed. People thought about where they wanted to place a cache and prepared it in advance. Micros, usually 35mm film canisters for log only caches were beginning. Nanos did not exist. Cachers put at least their home location in their profiles. It was FUN. Now Geocaching is a big business selling everything from Premium Memberships to Geocaching Pencils. It's now all about the numbers - How many finds you have. How many caches you hid. The caches big enough to hold something usually have junk or worse, trash. I can't write small enough to sign some of the logs in the micros or nanos. Now a cache is often a blank piece of paper in an old pill bottle under a light pole skirt in a parking lot. And you needed a GPS to find them, not just your everyday smart phone. I don't expect it will ever go back to the old days but maybe, some geocachers will put some thought into a new cache instead of just putting a piece of paper in a guardrail along the road. (If you do the latter, at least put it in a place that has a nice view and is safe to get to.)

I find that most micros present very little challenge. They are either on the guard rail, in the street sign in the space between the sign and the post, in the knothole of the tree, or in the base of the lamp post. That accounts for roughly 92.7 percent of them. I agree, how many times can you go from parking lot to parking lot for the same type of cache-- the camo'ed 35mm zip-tied to a tree before it gets really boring?! Or the magnetic nano stuck in the park bench. The cache has to offer some effort on our part to go out exploring new areas and trails. If it's all about the numbers, then go for it, but for us, the experience of hiking in the woods on a new trail is what we're about.

We have been caching for 6 years. It used to be fun to find a cache and see what there was to trade. The only reward for finding a micro is one more find. It's gotten to be all about the numbers. And we are giving up the game because of it.

It's all about the numbers. We have been geocaching for 6 years. It used to be fun to find a cache and see what's in it and trade. Or we would look for a cache that would take us on a hike in a new place. Now there is a cache on every corner and most of them are micros. We're leaving the game.

Thanks to all that responded to this problem. It seems that it corrected itself on the waypoint indexing. But, I ran into so many other problems with this unit that it was sent back. As far as I was concerned, spending over 8 hours trying to get the thing to work was 8 hours too many. Going back to my old Garmin for the time being. I really did want this thing to work, but the only thing that I was truly impressed by was the satellite tracking. Oh, the other reasons it was going back was that there wasn't enough room on the SD card provided to even load a section of CO topo and it does not accumulate feet for elevation gain/loss which were the primary reasons for even getting this unit.

I just bought a Delorme Earthmate PN-40 and so far, my impressions have not been favorable. Yesterday, after many tries finally got it to download caches to the unit, then found out I was running F/W 2.6 and needed to update to Version 2.8. Well, today, I updated to V 2.8 and it erased the caches that I had downloaded. When I tried to RE-DOWNLOAD yesterday's caches, I get an error message that says "Waypoint Indexing Problem". I've tried turning off the GPS (which I couldn't do yesterday) and restarting, trying different UBS ports, refreshing the geocaching info. Right now, I'm really at a loss and am ready to send this thing back and go back to my reliable OLD Garmin eTrex Summit. Any ideas out there about what is going on with this thing? Thanks!