boda

There was a lot of prep and planning. Even the warnings had a lot of thought. Warn too much and it all gets ignored, warn too little and folks get themselves into trouble. You can do this road in a minivan if you drive real slow and walk to 15-20% of the caches. I guess you can ignore them, you don't have to get them all. There are no boulders or major washouts on the main road. The side roads can get a bit rough. If you have an SUV, you could do 45 on the long stretches. 80% of the main road is pretty smooth, but when you that one small washout, you will shake up your suspension. The paved road will also sneak up on you so watch for cross traffic. Long story short, the road is pretty darned good for a dirt road. Just be carfeful of the rough spots. Thank you, That is a beautiful, quiet area. I plan to pick up a few in the near future.

NGA Seems like a difficult task to prep and set out all those caches - let alone in such a short time. Your description states words to the effect of: High clearance and 4WD. Does that only apply to some areas of the trail or are they needed througout? I've driven on some of those "roads" in that area and they seem to be a mix of rough terrain, sand, or dry stream beds. Do all of these apply? Thanks

Do you plan to be caching in the open desert 40-some miles west of Vegas? Ever? If not then ignoring these isn't even an issue for the vast majority of you. I currently have 2 PQs. One is a route that goes through that area and the other is just off that route near the PT. So far, I see that it added about 25 or so to my route PQ and had little effect upon the other. Yawn. As has been mentioned, there are numerous ways to avoid some, or all, of the PT when running a PQ. I probably won't pick up any of those caches on the way in or out of Las Vegas; but, if I decide to do so, I can easily run some PQs that will give me those caches. BTW, for all it's desolation, it is a beautiful place to hike. That's from a guy born and raised in the midwest and who dislikd the desert for quite a few years.

I use an Oregon for caching and the nuvi to navigate to the cache, so I send caches to my nuvi as POIs (.gpi files). I prefer, now, to use GSAK to export the POI files. This gives you a limited amount of info, but there are other ways to get more data. There are some GSAK macros that are great; but I'm sorry I don't have the time to look them up now. I know someone else has the link available.

You mentioned this camera in a previous thread. I checked into it and compared it to the others and liked what I saw. It is a P & S, but has some control capabilities. It also has a view-finder - a deal breaker for me. Although LCD screens are much better now, I really dislike using them in bright sunlight.

Yep - that's it. Sorry for not explaining it. The type I have is shown it the top photo. It's about a foot long and 6 inches high/wide. They are used in the case of sleep apnea, where the tissues in the throat close down when your your jaw muscles relax as you sleep. It is a dangerous condition for a number of reasons; and many do not realize they have it.

Much the same experience. At one time TSA didn't care about the CPAP. I never took mine out of the bag. Now it's a different story. They not only want it out, they walk it over to a different area and really go over it. Meanwhile, all the electronics get a simple xray - although I now have to take the laptop out. I had good look on flights with a 60CS from the center seat. Good signal and fun to track. I asked if I could use the GPS and the flight attendant said it was OK above 10,000 ft. I didn't realize until later that the airline did not allow GPS use. On the way out, the pilots asked me how well it worked.

Yes We pulled up to a cache and got out of the car to hunt a cache we had DNFd a year earlier. Soon a truck pulled up and parked behind us. The driver got out, sat on a nearby rock and watched us. After I found the cache, I went up to talk to the driver. Turns out he was the cache owner. He was picking up his caches because he was being transferred and couldn't maintain them any more. As we left, we handed him the cache with our thanks and drove off. As it turns out both he and we were over 50 miles from home, so it was a bit of a coincidence.

I seldom use bookmarks, but often use PQ's. At times, however, bookmarks come in handy. Recently we found a puzzle cache that required you to find 34 caches to get to the final. It required two PQs of 500 each to show the area containing all caches. I just did a bookmark of all applicable caches and then ran a PQ on that. Easy. (Later I discovered that the cache owner created a bookmark and made it public.) The same applies to any group of special caches you want to separate from the group. There are other ways, including GSAK filters, but sometimes bookmarks just seem to work better.

The following is a quote from the Route 66 cache description: Two older caches; go to one and find it, then follow the directions to go to this one. Thanks for pointing these out, I think I'll go after them sometime.

Triple Crown has some good recomendations. I, however, do not have concerns over the screen brightness.

That's all I can say. Back to the OP's question: I became a premium member to get the PQs, not to support the site. Now things are reversed. I genuinely need to support the website that helps make caching so much fun.

PQs are strictly restricted to one local area. Nothing off planet. Just to amplify a bit. PQs are restricted to one specific area. You can, however, create a PQ for any area at any time - up to 5 per day. When I leave home on a trip, destination caches are already loaded into my GPS, including caches along the route if I am driving. About that "off the planet" thing - speak for yourself.

Normally, I would agree with you - but it is not needed in this case.

When you think about, if you are navigating from Sydney to LA, 10 feet will get you pretty close.

You said you have downloaded PQ's before, so I'm not sure if I understand your problem. If you download one cache at a time to your Oregon, each cache will be in a separate GPX file. If you download a PQ GPX file, it will contain all the caches in that PQ - all in one GPX file. I agree with PDOP's reponses on the other areas.

I carry at least two pens. The pens in the caches are often missing/broken/out of ink, so this way I'm covered. I take people at their word. If they say they went to my cache - they did. I check the logs as I do maintenance so, if I noticed, I'd delete any on-line logs where no physical log exists. I like Briansnat's comment about geocaching or geologging. I place a cache to take someone somewhere or to have a fun experience. If they tell me I've succeded in that goal, then I'm happy.

We don't have a definitive strategy, but we generally cache in a particular area and target caches close to each other. We have mountains, valleys and deserts so we just pick one area depending on weather and go for 1 or 2 on a nice hike or larger numbers when we feel like it. We always leave a lot of caches near home so that we can fall back on them if needed. We do pick up caches on the way to the area we have selected, but not many. We even get into the LA area at times - maybe we'll see you there.

Drag your route's GPX file into it??? You must be a premium member to use the cache along a route feature. Once you set up your route, you create a pocket query of that route, which is emailed to you as a zip file. This PQ contains up to 500 caches. You unzip the file and extract the gpx file (there are usually two in the zip file, but one is for child waypoints). Open up GE, open up the folder containing the gpx file. Click and drag the gpx file onto the GE page. I'm sure that someone could explain this process better than I, but that is the gist of it.

I'm sure there are a number of ways to do this. I use GSAK and sort on distance. I also use Google Earth. Open GE, drag your route's GPX file onto it and then you can see the caches in order and click on each one to get to the cache page.

On a recent trip we had: 2 couple who cache together 1 Streetpilot 1 Nuvi 1 60 CSx 2 Oregon 400Ts 2 iphones with GC App I decided to leave my 60 CS at home We only got lost 3 times - not too bad.

Not as unusual as you might think. Seven of us were walking along a trail when we spotted a flying squirrel on the ground. The squirrel looked confused for a couple of minutes but then ran up to my friend and proceeded to run up his leg. My friend did a fantastic dance and the beast jumped to the ground. I thought that was hilarious but my laughter was suspened when I noticed the squirrel coming my way. Sure enough - up my leg as well until I, too, "danced" him off. Both of us were wearing shorts and the squirrel made it to the short's legs in both cases. We still get the required jokes concerning his goal. On another cache, my son and I flushed out a mule deer from about 20 feet. A lot of noise and two startled cachers. About 100 yards further on up the hill, I heard a strange sound and instinctively yelled "stop" to my son. There was the rattlesnake just under the small boulder I was going to climb over. So much for boulder hopping.

Both are good options for the reasons mentioned in previous posts. On a personal basis, I gotta go with the Oregon and Nuvi. I had routeable maps on my 60CS, and loved them. Then I got a Nuvi and used it exclusively for getting to the caches. It had a brighter and larger screen, voice, and it was much, much easier to enter waypoints (IMO). The Nuvi also has other features not offered by the Oregon. I traded my 60CS for an Oregon, and still feel the same way. That being said, I think you will be happy either way you go.

Found one once. Nice hide next to the trail; but it didn't last long. It was just a bad container on so many levels. I liked the cache as a whole, however.

You might try something like this cache: GC18GBT Just Over the Fence You still have a choice to make - but you use both states in the process.