vegaschick

Not all cachers will agree with your set of morals, and they find a way to justify their way of geocaching, whether it's right or wrong. And no matter how you try to limit their ability to "cheat" they will always find a way around it. Heck, I know of a few cachers (one of them is/was a highly respected member of the Nevada geocaching community) that don't even bother to log their finds online but have admitted to me that they didn't search for the cache. And as I recall, you yourself have criticized me and a number of my friends because we stamped our names in the logbooks and didn't write the date in the logbook. You will drive yourself nuts worrying about all the other cachers and their approach to caching. Where do you draw the line? Some people were replacing caches, some replaced the original log with some crappy little green paper. Some people were so lazy that they stamped the top of the cache container, some people went out and found 500 caches but logged all 1500 because it was a "team" effort. What are the cache owners supposed to do in response to someone "piggy backing" caches? (Log Shifting would be the correct term if the cachers were removing only the log, but since they're moving the entire cache, that name doesn't work.) They can't delete the person's logs and they have no proof it's being done or who is doing it. There were some pretty high-profile names out there doing the very same thing. Whether it's right or wrong, no sense in worrying about something that you won't be able to change and as for the people Moving caches from one mountain top to another on a whim? I think you're stretching it now. People that hit the mountain top caches are generally not "numbers runners" and aren't in the sport for competition. No matter what, people will always find a way to get around the "rules," so you have to look at the bright side. AT LEAST the cachers that were piggy backing the caches actually WENT to ground zero and located the cache! All you can do is take comfort in knowing that your numbers are honest and not pumped up. And for the record, it isn't a "so called power trail," it IS a power trail and I would go so far as to say it's a Mega Power Trail. I wasn't out there for the numbers, I was out there to hang out with my friends, meet cachers that I've only known through e-mail and make new friends.

That's why it was done in a corner that wouldn't be touched by others and wasn't recognizable as blood, since it dried. If the cache owner were worried, he would have rushed out and replaced the log. He didn't. And it didn't stop any other cacher from finding/signing the log, no one even made mention of it. And if you think a half-drop of blood on a cache log is bad, you should run a culture of the bacteria you can find on the dollar bill in your pocket....I'll bet it's a lot worse than that drop of blood on the logbook.

I figure that god invented green leaves to allow log books to be signed when a pen is missing. It's at least as legible as my signature which tends to be different than my online name. Cactus spines can be used on those times you forget a pen in the desert. I walked about a quarter mile to a puzzle cache at night in the winter with my best friend and our two daughters and we still had another quarter mile to go, when I realized I left my pen in the car. Best Friend didn't have one, of course our daughters didn't either. I wasn't going back to the car because it was going to eat up too much time. (Our husbands thought we were shopping for wedding supplies, but we'd been "shopping" for about 4 hours by this time. We spent 20 minutes, all 4 of us, looking for that cache. My luck, there was no pen. So I walked 25 ft to the nearby cactus and stabbed my right index finger and "signed" the logbook in the upper left-hand corner. And I made note of it online. When I saw the cache owner a few weeks later, he asked me if I really did that and I said absolutely. As a geocacher, I will do what I have to do to log a cache!

Coins received. Thank you, PIF!

I would have posted this sooner, but I had a few stops to make before I made it home.... I got a phone call from PIF and the coins will be shipped out tomorrow. There was some sort of mix-up and the fulfillment center didn't have my address (but they had my phone number?), so now that I've received a personal phone call, I feel a lot better.

Eartha: I tried contacting him through the GS e-mail, through his Geocaching profile e-mail link, and bish0p@powercaching.com, all three at least twice. I can find no other e-mail addresses linked to his site for him. I guess I won't be getting any coins. With any luck, he won't show his face on the board and scam any more people. I know the money went to a good cause, and I would have donated without the promise of geocoins, but the fact is that he made a promise that he didn't/couldn't keep. That makes me sad.

I am taking Christmas into consideration. The OP said that he would send me an e-mail when the geocoins were in the mail. I have NOT received an e-mail, which means the coins haven't been shipped. I understand that the coins might be held up at the post office, but that e-mail confirmation that he promised me isn't.

I received an e-mail on December 2, saying that the coins would be shipped out on the 7th, and that I'd receive a confirmation e-mail when they shipped. I have yet to receive that confirmation e-mail; needless to say, I haven't received any coins either.

I've sent two e-mails, through their Geocaching profile and not received a response.

Nope. Not one coin, not one word.

Has anyone received their coins?

My T-Mobile service roamed when I was in Arkansas a couple years ago too, worked great there. But Nevada is completely different than Oklahoma/Arkansas/most other states. I was up near Pioche about 6 months ago and had no cell service through T-Mobile and my phone did not "roam." My friends (on Verizon) that were camping with us had coverage and they are the reasons I switched. One of my other geocaching friends, who travels throughout our state for work, has AT&T for his personal service and no coverage in those areas, but his Verizon phone works fine. There are several areas here in the desert southwest where the only coverage is Verizon. Perhaps the iPhone is on a different system though and would work in the same areas as Verizon

I went out hiking with a friend a couple years ago to a trail that I knew had a cache on it. I had problems finding the cache because I couldn't get a good coordinate lock. So we stopped at a rock to take a break and I happened across the cache. Since we hadn't planned on caching, I didn't take a pen. I got home and e-mailed the owner to see if I could log the find (after giving him detailed information about cache location and description)--he e-mailed me back and said that I had NOT found his cache, but I could go ahead and log it anyways. The cache I found was about 200 ft. off from the posted coordinates (I checked it when I got home). My guess was that someone from out of town had hidden a cache, then submitted it but got denied because it was too close to the existing cache and they never went back to get it. By the way, I never logged it as a find.

The G1 seems to be fine. And T-Mobile service is great here in Las Vegas, and it was pretty good in Reno too, I just can't travel anywhere in between with it (Tonopah, Ely, Pioche). If the service provider has poor coverage, what good is the phone?

When it comes to puzzle caches, I'm strictly solving it for the puzzle and not size or location.

My boyfriend and I broke up almost two years ago because he felt I spent too much time caching. We got back together almost a year ago under the condition that he would NEVER, EVER complain that I cached too much again. We've gotten along find since then and he even caches with me more now than he did then! Besides, I call it even. He sits in front of the daggone television watching football 3-4 nights a week and Nascar. At least with my hobby, I get out of the house!

I have literally skipped over bids and proposals that I've received stricly based on the ability of the person to put together a coherent sentence. I could understand the English issues if it were the laborers doing it, but not the sales people, such as in construction terms. I don't think it has to do with education, though. Perhaps a small part of it, yes. But I think a lot of people are just lazy. I've met a few of these cachers and they don't seem illiterate. In fact one of our local cachers, who is still young, is in a magnet school and wants to become an aeronautical engineer; yet he doesn't capitalize his letters, he doesn't put a space between the period and the next sentence, and as it was pointed out to me by another cacher, he doesn't know how to spell "experience." For someone that chalks himself up to be a brainiac, he must have missed English class.

Maybe Groundspeak should come up with a new volunteer position--Volunteer Grammatical Reviewer. The person would have to have access to edit each cache page. Can I volunteer for that job? Seriously, I'm quite obsessive about proper spelling and punctuation, but I also know that not everyone is as great as I am. When I see the cache pages that seem to be written by those that pay little attention to what they write, I just roll my eyes. And then I go find the cache. I'm not going to NOT search for a cache just because it was written up by someone that might be illiterate. I wish more people were more detail-oriented, but it's just that--a WISH. It'll never happen.

Donation sent. Forgot to READ the instructions and I sent an e-mail.

Mine's pretty basic: I live in Vegas and I refer to women as "chicks", so I just became vegaschick. I couldn't think of anything more original.

I've ordered from there several times and no issues.

I love solving puzzle caches and have solved quite a few from all over the country. I would never dare to think about logging them as a find though! the guidelines are pretty clear: sign the logbook, then log your find online. There are two stages of every mystery cache. First, figure out the answer, THEN go get the cache. Just because I did the first part doesn't entitle me to claim I did the second part.

Expansion of members has a lot to do with it as well. I don't know if quality has dropped. There's an increase in urban caches (usually considered to be lower quality), but there's also in increase in the rural caches--it just depends on how far you're willing to drive. I love the rural caches, I just don't have much time nowadays to get to them and caching is usually done between photo shoots or my daughter's schedule.

They're allowed. I have 18 caches and in 15 of those 18 is a number. You collect all those number and you get the coordinates to the mystery cache. No issues with publication at all.

Our spring is my favorite time to cache, just after Girl Scout cookie (mid-March) and into May.