RockyRaab

The "Launch Pad" series of TB drops along I-80 stretch eastbound almost as far as Wells. And there are a decent number of interesting caches (some micros, but fun) in Elko. I make the Salt Lake to Reno run three times a year (for the Big Reno Gun Show) and seldom fail to hit a new cache or two along the way to break up driving fatigue.

I was both a Boy Scout AND an Air Force pilot. When flying, there's no pulling off the road to stop, no going back for what you forgot...and bad, bad consequences for not having it. So I tend to carry a backup And an alternate backup And a secondary alternate backup And standby secondary alternate backup If those fail, there's always my emergency standby secondary alternate backup.

Not my "birth certificate" name, but it's the one I grew up with since High School. Used it as a DJ, on the radio, as a writer and as my invariable screen name. Oh, lightning? I've been hit seven times. Five while in airplanes and twice on the ground. Yeah, it's nasty.

To mangle Sir Edmund Hillary, "We place it because it isn't there." While it's nice to have a reason for a particular cache location - be it scenery or whatever - there's no reason NOT to place one if it meets the guidelines. Heck, a cache in a dump is better than no cache at all!

Bahamadiver, you turn to your 7-year old and say, "See, that's why it's great to be a FTF!"

Retired USAF Lt Col with 23 years. Ten active, 13 Reserve. Forward Air Control pilot with 300 combat mission over Cambodia, 1971 (the book is in work). Instructor pilot - jet. 2,000 hours flight time. Media Relations Officer USAF Space Program. Will still be a soldier when they nail the lid down.

I simultaneously found a four-footer AND the cache I was seeking recently. This was a non-venomous snake (didn't recognize what kind) and I would have left it alone, but it was wounded in several places. Couldn't tell if it had been hit with a big stick or rocks - or had been run over. This was only about a hundred yards from a highway. I shot the poor thing out of mercy. No mention of it in the log, which had been signed only an hour or so earlier. Buried the snake and re-hid the cache. I hope the next cacher finds only one of the two! Even though I'm very allergic to venom, I kinda like snakes. Never have feared them, and they are amazing animals to handle.

The official name for the grouping of GPS satellites is the "constellation." A group of cachers? a "whopoint" because the one who finds it will be the one who points and says, "Here it is!"

As I remember, it meant Still Virgin. But that was a VERY long time ago...

I know that when you are dead you are dead and you don't know if someone walks on your grave. But there's a certain sense of respect involved. Whether you believe or not, cemeteries are consecrated places. The people who DO believe place great stock in that, and they care about the places where their loved ones rest. If you don't think so, just try prancing about on any grave at Arlington. Try that Unknown guy's tomb. Please. The guard there who protects and honors my fallen brother (whoever he is) will happily stick his bayonet up your attitude. And then he'll get really nasty. I'm sorry if I seem peevish. But there are such things as respect and decorum. If some of you can't see that or understand it, more's the pity.

I've found two cemetery caches now, and I thought one of them was okay and the other not. Here's why: the acceptable one used the markings on a headstone as the clues to the second stage of a multi-cache. Nothing hidden, nothing disturbed, and I learned interesting facts about a family - which honored their memory. The unacceptable one actually hid the cache in a tree within the cemetery. In the process of the usual "circling" procedure, it was inevitable that I walked on some graves with no cause. I viewed that as crass and base. I regretted it immediately. That cache didn't belong there. Those are my opinions. Anyone is free to agree or not as they see fit.

DNF = Does Not Float? sorry about both

I'm a two-digit newbie, so perhaps that colors my opinion. I have three nearby caches that I've not tried for simply because they are snowbound. My reasons are both personal and polite. One, I don't think a "they never found the body until spring" heart attack is an acceptable price for a find. And, two, all three caches are in areas where snowmobilers play. I'm sure they'd investigate footprints/tracks in the snow, probably resulting in a stolen cache. But as soon as the ground is bare and reasonable dry, I'll be on them like a duck on a june bug. Come to think of it, it might be June before any travel bugs therein are found!

Maybe even longer ago... When all photographs and televisions were black and white, radio (AM only) still had mysteries and comedies, WWII surplus was still new, airlines still flew propellor airplanes, cars were stick shift... ...and boys could pedal bikes anywhere with .22 rifles over their shoulders, space travel was fantasy or Buck Rogers, pollution was what happened to drunks, hoboes still came to the door asking to work for a meal, they played the World Series over the school loudspeaker system, kids could be sent to the neighborhood tavern to fetch a bucket of beer... ...gas was .29 a gallon, milk was three half-gallons for .88 and bread was a quarter a loaf, stores gave Green Stamps, a new Chevy went for 2,000, but good wages were 8,000 a year... ...the smart kids could buy and assemble working radios and stuff from Heathkits, Mr Wizard ruled on the TV, big companies had summer picnics for all their employees and Christmas parties for all their children... ...and the bad things: polio struck down 55,000 kids a summer, iron lungs were considered miracles of medicine, mumps sterilized boys, scarlet fever ruined kids' hearts, measles could blind you and smallpox kill you, there were orphanages and delinquent schools in every county, there were poor farms and insane asylums, TB sanitariums and chain gangs... ...even minor car crashes killed people, smoking in bed burned thousands of homes and families every year, there were several train wrecks every week, with plane crashes almost as often, every kid practiced drop and cover drills because the Russians might nuke us at any moment, and you could be drafted three years before you could vote or drink. Nostalgia: it isn't what it used to be.

In low earth orbit, satellites (like the Space Shuttle and ISS) are moving at about five miles a second. If your GPSr has a "refresh" rate of about once a second (as mine seems to have), it's gonna go nuts trying to give you a fix. The satellites are indeed directional, in order to maximize the power of the signal. If they simply radiated in all directions, the signal would be many times weaker than it is. That factor aside, a GPSr would work just fine at all altitudes less than the 12,000-mile orbital altitude of the satellites. The error of the reading is not angular, so the analogy of the bubble is incorrect. Since the fix is computed by time alone, if you were closer to the signal source (the satelllites), the error would be smaller as the time of travel for the signal decreased. Not that we're talking about a lot of time, at the speed of light. Now, to eliminate the orbital velocity factor, let's imagine placing a GPSr in an artillery shell and firing it straight up. The coordinate "fix" would remain almost the same as the shell rose, because it would still be above the same point on the planet, but the altitude reading would change. The reason IVxIV's waypoint didn't change is because he was still at the same lat/long coords. Changing the altitude readout doesn't really change the waypint, because the system reads, essentially, in two-dimensional space. It does give a vertical readout, but to set a THREE-dimensional waypoint, you'd have to enter three coordinates. We only enter two for lat and long. In other words, the system may tell you what your altitude is, but it doesn't compute that factor as a coordinate point. It's an "info only" kind of thing. Clear as mud?

Well, let's see..there was the time I droped a five-man Special Forces team literally ONTO a tiger in Cambodia, but that was long before geocaching, LOL! Here in Utah, we have mountain lions, bears, big nasty moose, and (recently) wolves, plus the usual assortment of feral dogs and cats, bobcats and rabid skunks. We're up to our gahooties in coyotes, but they've never been known to attack people - unlike packs of feral dogs, which sure do. Our badgers can be umbracious little boogers, too.

Absolutely, positively love mine. The screen seems to be a bit larger than most I've seen and is quite bright and clear. It also seems to be very accurate: I've had it direct me to within two feet of several caches, and it was correct! I got mine for Christmas with the whole shooting match of accessories: car mount, MapSend street mapper and all. Make sure you have a free RS-232 (serial) port on your 'pooter, because that's the only way you can up/download info. My new desktop only had one, and I needed that for something else so I had to order a cheap plug-in board with extra ports to run the GPS. No biggie. The expense only hurts once, and nobody ever regretted owning the best.

I love the anticipation of regular caches - what's going to be in it when I find it? So I tend to shun virtuals and most micros. Heaven save me from nanos. I hate to admit it, but the first time I went to a lampost cache, I thought it was pretty clever - hidden under the bolt cover. My first hide duplicated it. But then I started reading this forum, and realize that maybe it wasn't so clever after all - or so unique. Webcams, silly logging rules and such just turn me cold. I might try a puzzle cache if there were any nearby, and I have only done one multi. It was perhaps one of the good ones: a micro container with the coords for the real cache in it. Frankly, now that I'm a bit older and a bit out of shape, I tend to pass on the more athletic ones. A terrain factor over 2.5 makes me wonder if a McToy is worth a heart attack. I found one today that had me following a sometimes slick trail across a cliff, and I almost turned back out of prudence. Thanks for this thread. It opened my eyes a bit. My hides from now on will be a lot more interesting.

Peter is correct. However, if the receiver were not delimited, it would work fine in space. The reading would still be "at" a lat/long coordinate, which would represent the spot you were directly over. But the altitude reading would be a doozy! (Yes, I used to work for NASA, and I helped launch the very first GPS satellite.)

Fairly new cacher, fairly old shooter, first time poster. I have a Carry Concealed License and almost always wear a gun. I've not had to shoot anyone since Vietnam, but I have had to pull my gun twice. Both were attempted carjackings. Neither succeeded, but both bad guys left the scene at high speed and with cue-ball sized eyes. The next one could be while I'm out caching. These days, there are other types of "cashers" out there: those who want to separate you from yours being the bad kind. Where I cache, there are also rattlesnakes, mountain lions, feral dogs and cats, rabid skunks and who knows what else besides the mobile meth labs and pot growers. And this is considered one of the safe states! Just a week ago, I shot a rattlesnake just a few feet from a cache I was seeking. I carry a first aid kit, survival kit and other emergency gear when I cache. A gun just fits the same description. But if I knew or suspected I WOULD need one, I wouldn't go! (Hey Torry - yeah, I have seen the elephant: 300 combat mission as a FAC)

There are lots of avid cachers here in Utah, and they seem to have developed a kind of in-state travel bug called a cach-u-nut. I say "seem to" because I can't find out ANYTHING about the darn things. The utahgeocachers website has a FAQ section, but nowhere does it say what the main object of all their games is. Or at least I can't find it if it does explain. Anybody here know?