mattressgnome

I'm going to have to agree that these new maps are wretched. I cache in Central Pennsylvania near Penn State, where we have some of the best aerial maps due to the Penn Pilot program and various state subsidies. We also have had an extensive 2nd and 3rd growth foresting initiative that saw much of the area developed, then abandoned, razed and replanted, leaving a treasure trove of old trails, foundations and historic sites to be found. Much of the local non-urban caching here led you on these old abandoned roads and to abandoned towns. Google maps (and in some area Bing maps) had clear, crisp aerial depictions that loaded quickly, with respectable detail allowing you to find these gems, and were updated at least somewhat often. In looking over my caching areas in Mapquest, the resolution is undeniably lower, the colors are muted and washed almost to the point where you can't tell canopy from grassland, and the load times are abhorrent. There are some building still showing on Mapquest and OSM that were demolished in July 2008, and an entire housing development that went up Oct 2008-May/Jun 2009 is still showing as a wooded lot in Mapquest. Four new roads were added in northern State College in the past 2 years, of which 2 show up in Google, and none show in Mapquest. I can understand the switch to a free service, but to one that so clearly is not updated routinely, is of poorer quality with lower-resolution images, that tiles inconsistantly if at all, and is slower as well... poor decision Groundspeak. Poor poor decision.

There's obviously multiple ways to check for saturation, I'm just suggesting one that I have found to be much, much easier than the existing methods. If we're going to mention every idea that can be used other than mine, why not talk about a paper map and a drafting compass. Oh, because that's time consuming and annoying, much like plugging in numbers or running searches. Simple circles, which already exist inside the Google Map programming, would also be infinitely easier to interpret if you don't have a specific cache location in mind, but are looking for areas that are withing the guidelines. You know you want to hide your cache somewhere near XXX, but you're not sure which areas you should hunt for that elusive perfect hiding spot. If you know, from a quick glance at a shaded circle, that the left half of the woodlot, the entire fence line near the baseball field, etc. etc. are no good, you can focus your search more effectively. That's what my suggestion is about.

I understand the saturation guidelines, and I've cached enough to know that the map wouldn't be able to include all stages, points, exclusions, areas of sensitivity and the like. I still think this would be an excellent tool for a hider because let's face it, it's annoying to have to compute distances over and over again from all the surrounding caches. Example:A new monument is erected that would be a great spot for a cache, but there's already a few hides nearby. I could A. find a distance calculator and plug in all the coordinate pairs of every cache and the digits I got in the field, then have to head out to the field and take a new set at a guessed location if my original recordings were no good. -OR- B. Glance at a map. The map would tell you, quickly and easily, what areas near your intended cache location were available for a hide. If there were 11 rocky outcroppings near where I wanted to place my cache, what would be easier? Taking readings at each and comparing every single measurement to known caches, or glancing at a map and seeing 'These 7 won't work, but these 4 are outside the circles and are ok.' The answer is obvious. As for not hiding a cache every .1 of a mile, while that is all good and wonderful in the text, it's a bit ignorant of the fact that sometimes high cache density is a good thing, especially in areas where accessible locations are limited. I live near Penn State Main Campus, and it's just a fact that the vast majority of students living here do not have access to vehicles to take them far from campus. Are the student cachers just supposed to be content finding the 2 dozen or so caches that exist already nearby, since they cannot easily travel outside the area? I don't think so. Exacerbating this problem is a distinct lack of caches with terrain 1 in my area. Little kids cache, people have disabilities that prevent them from climbing hills and traversing rocky terrain, etc., so being able to scout location easily for Dx/T1 urban caches can be nothing but a boon.

528' circles would be even more useful ;-) Well said, I was working on a binary puzzle and had 2^9 on the brain.

A neat little feature I found in Google Maps is the ability to add a shaded polygon around a point on a map. I've used it to add [edit]528' radius circles around all of the coordinates for every cache in my area in an offline map, and this has made hiding new caches MUCH MUCH easier. I am wondering if GS could implement this feature as a toggle on the Google Maps they use to display caches, and also what the caching community thinks of this. Before we could alter coordinates for solved puzzle caches this would have only been somewhat useful, but now with the update I see this being of immense aid to those who place, especially in urban and cache rich areas.

I invite you all to look at GC1W47Z. The CO, HolyCowboys, pride themselves on making the most difficult and perplexing caches in the State College area, and this one has gotten so obnoxious it is the only Traditional left on my map in a broad swath. The lightpole is a 140 foot tall steel pole on the Penn State campus, and cache is a bison tube wrapped in neo magnets. Supposedly, it was originally placed about 15 feet off the ground, so that you would need to get a nearby golf hole flag to knock it down. Well, it apparently became funny to place it higher and higher, and now the cache is ~90 feet up the light pole. Apparently the owner, after he last checked the logs, just threw it as high as he could and managed to get it to stick at the top of his arc. This is right next to the Penn State athletic fields and a public golf course. Does anyone have a blowtorch and the number of a good lawyer?

HAHA! I usually have my leatherbound cache log with me and my cell/GPSr in my hand, and since I am a biologist who is used to doing field work, often I am searching for ice and wind damaged trees or looking for my stylus.

If any of those bottles are intact they can sell for quite a bit of money to antique dealers. In my hometown north of Phila. they actually excavate old outhouse pits from the mid to late 1800's looking for rare bottles.