EdgeMonks

Thank you for information. I think we'll rent some snowshoes for the trek.

We are set to tackle APE from the Annette Lake Trail in about 10 days. Do you have any idea about snow conditions this year? Past logs have read both deep snow and no snow in previous years for April.

We have a slightly earlier window of opportunity. We are flying to Seattle on April 7 and plan to go find the Ape-In-The-Snow from the Annette Lake Trailhead. I am told that this is 6 miles of rough and relatively steep trail, on Easter Sunday, April 8. There is some flexibility in the date depending on weather. We'll miss the tunnel, but if you are interested in hiking and looking in the snow and mud, please drop us a line.

I am looking for a PDA to be able to paperless caching. I keep looking at the next higher cost models and thinking that the higher cost might be useful. I am now considering purchasing the Axim X51v for its GPS and navigation abilities, but I read one review on Dell's website that complained about not being able to read the screen outside. Has anyone used this device in the field, and have you found the screen to be too dimly lit? I also found a device called the O2 XDA Orbit that appears to be only available in England. It appears to be much superior to anything else I have found. Does anyone have any experience reading that screen outdoors? Is it available in North America?

I like the DogBone and Red Handed coins that you have made, LFD. I'm also interested in the coins that you are having made, wavector - I hadn't heard about them before. Off topic - my sister used to live in The Hat, but we haven't been out there in years, nor could we make it to your event today. But back to the coins, and I'd like to make a comparison to the Disney pins. We have been to a few of the Disney theme parks, and they mint thousands of pins. Not just a few, but thousands. We bought a few several years ago, but there are people who were obsessed with trying to build their collections. I see that Disney now sells them for $12.95US/pin on their website, so it is likely that is the price at their parks as well. Is there a market to resell these pins? On Ebay, it looks like you can resell a pin for about $4-$5. So the market has been overwhelmed with pins, and the value has been diminished. I can see the same thing happening to the GeoCoins. My son and I like finding them, logging them, photographing them, and then releasing them again. We take them home to show my wife and daughter since they don't cache with us very often, and they like seeing them as well. If the number of coins keeps growing exponentially, the value of the coins will drop, unless the number of GeoCachers also keeps growing exponentially... We buy 15 or so coins of each of the issues minted around Calgary (put me down for 15 of yours, wavector) to help defray the cost of the minting. We might keep 1 or 2 of them, but the rest go out into caches for others to find. We hope, like wavector, that when children find these it increases their interest in the game. We especially like placing coins, or other Calgary memorabilia, in caches far from home for other cachers to pick up. Whether they are trackable or not really doesn't matter to us - the coins are kept by the next cachers anyway. As for minting coins to make money, I'll leave that for Disney.