Kite and Hawkeye

I'm sure you could contact your friendly neighborhood approver (probably the one listed on the cache page) and ask to change it to a multi. As far as I can tell, they just want to be included on these decisions, to avoid the messes that occurred when ordinary caches were, say, stolen and then converted to extremely non-coffetable-book-worthy virtuals, etc.

Don't know about your public universities, but where I've attended it's perfectly allowable for non-students to be on campus. They retain the right to throw you out if you commit certain violations of their conduct codes, and at one I know of you aren't supposed to be in the student union building unless you're a student or a union member, but other than that anyone is welcome. Our campus library is a government repository, and as such it *must* allow the public in. It would certainly be wise to place a cache such that finders need not do anything extremely suspicious, but given the bureaucracy at most schools I wonder if it'd be possible to even find anyone who thought they had the authority to grant permission.

We've had other geocachers pull the cell phone trick on US, when we were obviously walking down the trail holding an eTrex and looking for the same thing they were!

I think it depends on who owns the land where you're putting the cache. There are always exceptions to rules, such as when you're putting it in your backyard. But I don't think most parks would be pleased with your digging a hole, and it might lend credence to those who say, "See, geocachers are harming our land." If you don't have permission, and a park ranger comes across the cache, they're going to think that's how geocaching works. The guidelines say: Caches that are buried - If a shovel/trowel/pointy object is used to dig - in order to hide or find a cache - it's not appropriate.

If the coin represents the whole state, why are we disproportionately honoring its center by prominently featuring those coordinates? I'm not that fond of tracking coins as bugs. Travel bugs meet all of my object tracking needs, and frankly those only stayed fun for a little while. Travelers disappear, and coins that get a few miles on them start to look pretty beat-up anyway. With the new geocoins, people keep posting the # as an identifier ("Left coin #10xxx"), which opens them up to fake logs and such. I really don't think official numbering and tracking is worth the trouble. I suspect it would be cheaper to get the coins minted without individual numbering as well.

If you're putting a cache in a very fire-risky area, perhaps something besides an ammo can would be good... but in all other conditions, the ammo can will hold up better. I've never seen a cracked ammo can, or an ammo can that was wet inside, or a "time to replace the ammo can" log. On the other hand, I've seen dozens of tupperware-type containers that were in dire need of replacement -- cracked lids, failure to seal, etc. Plastic containers have a very short lifespan out in the elements. Well, three of the elements, anyway. Real tupperware will seal better and hold up longer than off-brand stuff, but for real durability I'm still voting for the ammo can.

So the coin was left for the owner of the cache, which if anything makes it worse. It seems reasonable to me that if someone wanted to get something to us, they might leave it in one of our caches. If all these people really wanted was to have the coin show up on their found page, they didn't have to take it with them.

quote:Originally posted by The Adams Family Circus:Just an FYI: The Off to Find a Wizard cache, the memorial from the Geocaching picnic in February, is back in circulation. Go get it! 8-) Earl, Ringmaster, The Adams Family Circus Darn, if you'd mentioned it before the picnic we'd have brought more swag to donate!

As far as I've ever heard, Electric Shavers' logs are all bogus. I don't think anyone from that team, if it even exists, visited the cache.

We've got a yellow and I never saw those waypoints. (We've had the thing for a year and a half now, so it's been cleaned out more than once, but if they were ever there, we must've missed them.)

I'd give it some time before emailing again. It looks like they haven't found a cache since July 16th, and there may be a reason for that. If you email too often, you risk annoying the person, and I'd hate to annoy someone who had my bug.

The cache page should make it abundantly clear when/if the cache isn't at the posted coordinates. If they're posting the parking or entrance coordinates, the description should tell you what to do next. It's probably best to start out with a more straightforward cache, though. Unless the cache is listed as a multicache (or possibly a mystery cache type), the main coordinates are for the cache itself, and any parking or trailhead coordinates the owners care to provide would be given later and clearly labeled as such.

quote:Originally posted by BrianSnat:Its a fact that the average geocacher is a 37 year old, married male, with 1.5 children and works in IT. I think Brian's got it. (No, this doesn't describe me and Hawkeye in the least, but at the most recent picnic there were a lot of people of the above description. Actually, they may have been a handful of years older, but who am I to judge?)

I did our local contender for the "world's smallest cache" the other week. When I found it, I was really tempted to take a picture, because it was tiny, and it looked cool. It was only on second thought that I realized it was obviously going to be a spoiler, so I wouldn't be able to post it anywhere. I don't think my enthusiasm could have lasted all the way to actually posting the pictures, but it's possible this wasn't done out of malice, just a lack of thought about the consequences. And, well, there are plenty of newbies around too. But I'd still delete the pictures before asking, because as long as they're sitting there, people may be viewing them and gettig spoiled!

(never mind, thought better of it.)

quote:Originally posted by joefrog:Okay, I mixed the two subjects I was thinking up while posting. Gimmie a break, it's 5 pm here. Now, rephrased -- if a site is already used for a virtual cache, can it also be used as a step while searching for a multi? Joel (joefrog) "Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for ye are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!" Sounds the same as your first question, to me.. could you clarify the difference?

I think it's weird, or possibly a bug nobody cares enough to fix, that in the drop-down menu when you log a cache it calls all the travel bugs in your possession "(whatever)" by (your login name, even though you don't own it).

quote:Originally posted by Renegade Knight:Is that rustice web service the same one as Skydivers service? Yeah, rusticweb = skydiver. For those interested, the link's here. Alas, both approvals (at least in our area) and notifications have been slow lately. I feel as though we're in a geocaching rut. Doesn't help that Hawkeye sprained his ankle and we're going to be stuck at 296 for weeks...

Having some (temporary) caches hidden in the area is fun. GPS games are fun. You can just have a potluck picnic, but it helps to also have something to do, as an icebreaker for those who don't know everybody in the area yet.

It's no longer possible to change the cache type after the original submission; I noticed this on our latest cache even before it was approved. You also can't change the coordinates too much, but I don't think it's been made clear what the allowable amount of change is, and if these changes are from the saved original value, or just a limit on the amount you can move the cache in one round of editing (in other words, can you move the cache a small amount daily until it's cumulatively a large distance away??).

I'm looking for a good flashlight. Right now, we have a pair of clip-on three-LED lights from Sharper Image. They run on 3 AAA batteries, and they're pretty bright -- they beat the heck out of our ordinary 2 D home flashlights. Still, they don't quite have the range I was hoping for. I do like the way they have a broad beam rather than a narrow, pinpoint light; a light that can have a wide OR a narrow beam would be ideal, but not necessary. I don't quite like the purplish/bluish cast of the lights we have, but I'm not entirely sure if that's because they're in a purple casing, or if all white LEDs have an off-tinge. What's the brightest kind of bulb? Multiple LEDs? Krypton bulbs? I don't want to carry a 4 D-cell Maglite; anything up to the side of an ordinary household flashlight is fine, though. Compactness is not the primary goal, and I'd rather have something bigger than a penlight if there's any tradeoff of power for size. I'd just like something a little brighter, and a little more penetrating, than the lights we already have. Don't want anything that only runs for an hour or two on a set of batteries, or anything that's going to set my bag on fire. I don't really want to swap lights for various purposes; I want one to use all the time. Just a really decent night-hiking light. Any ideas?

I'm not allergic, so forgive me if I'm a little blase. Hawkeye's managed to avoid the vast majority of poison oak reactions simply by washing (with handi-wipes in the field, more thoroughly at home). I don't know of a thing that will genuinely stop the reaction once it's occurred, though the usual stuff like calamine helps. I think if this stuff worked, we'd have heard about it before.

He's talking about the rusticweb alert service, which does seem to have been a little slow lately. We got three FTFs in our first week of being signed up for the service, but now the alerts are coming upwards of six hours after the cache is posted, by which time someone else has usually found it. I guess they just obsessively load their Nearest Caches page and see when something pops up in range; there's no better alert system out there that I'm aware of.

What time delay?

It's not hard to learn to use a GPS. Figure out how to mark a waypoint, and how to make the unit guide you to a waypoint; once you've got those down, you're in business, and you can learn more later. I turned on my gps during my morning break at work, and found my first cache during my lunch hour.