blindleader

If that's all there was, maybe 2. If there was a mile or more of that with a commensurate elevation gain, maybe 2.5 to 3. Hiking, not biking. For comparison, that looks about as hard as the average on the upper 1,500' of Lookout Lookout, which accounts for 1 full point of the 4 on that cache.

6.11. Ratings for difficulty and terrain (D/T) Look at the descriptions for 3.5, 4, 4.5. The ClayJar page has four different distance ranges to choose from. In addition there are three more variables for trail surface, vegetation and elevation changes. As an example I used it to calculate a rating for GCWTXZ Lookout Lookout. of 2/3.75. ClayJar gave it 1.5/4. fourteen years ago. Since the nominal round trip distance of 9 miles (14.5km) was very close to the upper limit of the range, and with elevation gain of 4,500' (1370m), it was easy to round up to terrain 4. Search difficulty was slightly higher than the CO listed, which does not surprise me as the vegetation around the cache has changed drastically in the ten years between the original hide and my find in 2015.

They are actually the same system, but the ClayJar calculator is more detailed. For example, where the geocaching.com guide uses vague terms such as " extended hike", leaving the cacher to guess at whether his x mile hike is "extended" or "significant distance", ClayJar gives numerical ranges and uses a variety of important characteristics missing from the geocaching.com guide. If the dumbed down geocaching.com system is what most people use for rating their caches, then it's no wonder ratings vary from one community to the next. Both terrain systems are geared toward hikes, and for that I'm convinced the ClayJar calculator would give more consistent results. For other types of terrain (developed parks, cityscapes, etc), each local caching group is on their own to decide such things as how to rate a cache that requires standing on the back of a bench and bracing ones self against a post while stretching to reach a container in the rafters of a picnic shelter vs. climbing ten feet up a mature cedar tree.

Not surprisingly, given the date, I don't see any mention of the extensive discussion of rating values that took place in the early years of geocaching. The current guidelines are ultimately based on the results of that discussion as recorded by ClayJar. ClayJar's rating system is a handy tool that, in some respects, is more detailed than the guidelines linked above.

I still can't log in. What's weird is that my GSAK run returned and expired token message and login from GSAK failed. But now GSAK works just fine without a new login.

When I started reading the last few months of this thread, I never imagined that I would suddenly find several irksome things to rant about. I'll restrain myself a bit, and just register one. I gave up counting the posts that had some variation of this statement: 'DNF' means exactly one thing: "Did Not Find". If you searched and didn't find then you should log a DNF. That should be enough comment... but I'm all revved up now. so... It doesn't matter what the excuse is. I've had DNFs in the woods where I didn't search a large enough area, or that the GPS had GZ more than a hundred feet away on that particular day on that particular mountain side. I've had them where "the force wasn't with me". I did that on a d1 cache once. Too many muggles around, construction made the approach too difficult, GZ appears to be destroyed, couldn't get the container open etc. are all good reasons to log a DNF, at least for the information it provides, and especially if you have a good story to tell. That way you have something to show for the effort. A good example would be the batch of DNFs I contributed to long ago when a good sized group couldn't get within two miles of the objective because the road was closed due to volcanic activity. If DNFs tend to trigger an ill-conceived bot to flag a problem, then it's up to the cache owner to read the logs and decide from their contents if there really might be a problem.

On a normal day,the hang gliders would land a couple minutes later 1,600 feet below, next to the road between Tiger and Squak Mtns. Stepping off. But when just the right wind funnels up between Tiger and Squak... On their way. they can fly north along the Cascades till the sun goes down. I just wonder if they have an informal agreement with SeaTac tower. I sort of doubt they carry Mode C transponders or radios for talking to ATC. Those specs, just a few of many that day, passed through KSEA Class B airspace if they got above 5,000 feet.

Not true. PQs that ran and contained old data still contain old data, and are still counting against the daily quota. Fortunately for me I have an unscheduled day coming up when I can re-run the PQs but it really is a royal PITA to re-schedule 10 or 20 PQs over two days.

GSAK getting no response from [download pocket queries] and [refresh cache data]. [Get recent logs] crashes GSAK. I've been trying for twenty minutes.

None of the replies given so far will give you accurate results. Spherical Trig (Haversine) formulas are adequate for very short distances, but since the Earth is not a sphere... Using UTM coordinates and Mr. Pythagoras will give you accurate distances but not across zone boundaries and not with good bearings. The good formulas with all the fudge factors are out there in the Googlesphere, or you can reverse engineer from this Javascript calculator. I just keep a copy of the page on my hard drive. There is also Compsys21 from the FAA, which is very powerful and a Royal PITA (the pain not the bread) to use. Its value is in being able to calculate intersections and allowing you to save sets of coordinates and calculations as text files which can be re-used by the program.

Back in the day, when I was trying for every FTF within five miles (before cell phones got smart enough), clothing was irrelevant to many of my FTFs, except as protection from dense foliage, and occasionally, exposure. In the middle of the night, most any wooded park in the Seattle area could be considered a "fine and private place".

I use to used gpsxonar on my iPAQ 2215. Unfortunately it won't install from my Windows 7 machine. If you have an XP machine I'd say go for it. Since gpxsonar isn't supported anymore, I'm looking for another application.

One can get used to a lower paying job, or amputated fingers, too. The spread out PQ pages seem to assume that everyone has a large Hi-def monitor. I do, but I prefer to not have to make my browser full screen and scroll for half an hour to see all my PQs. I just can't see any advantage, aesthetic or functional, to the grossly spread out look.

A couple years ago I bought the MAHA C-9000 smart charger because I wanted its programmability to get the most life out of those rather expensive NiMH batteries. A couple months ago it began acting squirrelly. That’s a technical term for “It didn’t do what I expected it to do.” Then one of the four stations went South. That’s another technical term for “Stopped working entirely.” I thought, like so many modern electronic gadgets, it would work for a couple of years, till the warrantee is safely over and then quit. But I decided not to give up on a rather pricy charger. So I went to MAHA's site and found they have a “limited lifetime warrantee”. That usually means that for a hefty percentage of the retail price, they’ll replace it. That’s better than shelling out full price for a new one. I contacted support and got an immediate reply asking for nothing more than my shipping address. Four days later I had a brand new unit and a prepaid return shipping label. A quick stop by a DHL drop box to return the old one and all is well. No money expended. It's said that a happy customer tells one person and an unhappy one tells ten. Just thought I'd even things up a bit.

For these forums, you have to have the picture online. But if you don't want to use a hosting web site you can upload photos to geocaching.com in a variety of ways. - To a cache listing page. - Attached to a Cache Log - To your profile (change/edit photo or avatar). You don't have to use photos uploaded this way as your avatar or as your displayed photo. It's like a gallery, that you can select from.

Your solution is ideal - old map for current participants. New map for new ones. No need to list a new cache even if the new map has a drastically different number of pages (doesn't look like it does, 90 vs. 99). Just have the slightly different requirements. I would even give the current participants the option of "upgrading" to the new map. After all, whichever number of pages people need, they still have to travel all over the state, A few extra boxes is insignificant next to the mileage and time spent. For the new version, I strongly disagree with those who would disqualify previously found caches. I've seen this rule applied in other states and the reasons given do not stand up (caching sure brings out the control freak in some people). The challenge is identical however many of the pages a person already has completed. It's just that some people will have already completed more of it than others. It isn't a competition or a race except for FTF, and I know from personal experience, how far down the list of factors, the number of already completed pages is. Besides that, it is possible that there will be participant that have found all the caches in at least one page, and therefore unable to complete the challenge.

Until today, all my weekly PQs have run by 0100 Pacific Time. It's now after 0800 and today's still haven't run. Something other than sliding down the queue is happening. I just did a copy and they all ran immediately

Definitely the current edition should be the standard for everyone who has already started the challenge. If many pages have dramatically different boundaries (more than a few miles), then option two might not be be fair to those currently working on the challenge. I see little need to archive the current listing, since the old page boundaries are permanently available electronically from M10B and the WSGA web site. If the changes are significant (a few miles here and there) but not dramatic, then perhaps a you could make the new edition the standard for all new participants after the corner data is available online. Current participants would have the option of changing over to the new edition. This would entail a bit more work for you so nobody would fault you for taking another approach. Whether or not you lean far enough toward option three to fall over, checking out the new edition is definitely the the next step. Until then, I think all discussion is highly hypothetical.

Does that mean that they are actively searching for them? Have they requested coordinates of the multis and puzzles? I think that would be a pretty silly waste of their time. I'd pay money to watch someone with no GPS or geocaching experience search for a few that I have in mind. As long as I have an opening for a rant: <rant> For a public entity to unilaterally institute a policy without public deliberation and without even the courtesy of a grace period or warning is pretty arrogant. If they claim the right to confiscate what they consider to be litter or abandoned property, I must point out that an active geocache is neither. On the other hand, I consider the removal of a cache to be theft. Petty theft? We don't consider caches as having much, if any monetary value, but consider what it really costs to establish a cache in time and effort. What would you charge if geocaching were a profession? I doubt that the simplest traditional geocache would come in much under $1,000 from my geocaching consulting firm. The parks department could be in some serious legal trouble. </rant> Do not take the above rant too seriously. None of that stuff has happened yet as far as I know, except for a short lived night cache a couple years ago, that had all its fire tacks removed. We'll just have to wait and see.

I submit that if this game exists at all in ten years, it won't be in any form recognizable today. Heck, the way it was played around here 4.5 years ago when I started is almost unrecognizable now. Re: your comments about too many caches. I see that the 500 cache radius for Saginaw is about 35 miles. From my residence in Seattle, the same number of caches lie within about 6 miles, and a big chunk of that space is water. In Silicon Valley, the 500 cache radius is about five miles. Yet in both those areas, with densities of 30-40 times that of yours, new caches are still being hidden. Sometimes it takes a bit of research to find good locations, but I have my eye on a few of them myself. Another thing to consider years down the road is the natural attrition of geocaches. In the past two years, about 7,000 new caches have been placed in the State of Washington. In that same time, about 3,000 caches have been archived. Experience will give you a more realistic perspective.

Usually keep the bearing and distance screen on and get the distance within a few feet, then search a circle that expands till I find the cache. I say 'usually' because what works depends a lot on the environment. In much of the Northwest, briansnatt's 40 feet method would be absurd, but if the ground is pretty open, often you can see the likely hiding places from some distance away. If that's the case, then that's what I do. Sometimes I don't even need to use GPS: I have never, ever matched coordinates on the display, and can't even imagine where it might be useful, unless you're stuck with some ancient device with no 'go to' function. I was recently in the UK, and never encountered the kind of steep, tree covered ground we have around Seattle. On several occasions, I got the distance down to a foot or two and grabbed the cache without taking more than a couple steps.

I beg to differ with Chuy! I easily keep the 10,000 active caches in my state updated every week with 21 PQs with no overlap. It's nice to have logs going back two years. More than once this has come in handy when an old log contained corrected coordinates that were never adopted by the cache owner. The trick is in updating archived caches, which do not appear in PQs. I use filters matching each day's PQs and sort by Last GPX date. Those not updated get downloaded by hand (easier and quicker than it sounds) and added into the database. When you're going to a specific area, run a radius PQ for that area so that GSAK has the freshest updates. Be sure to weed out the archived ones.

Don't wait twenty or thirty minutes for the unit to find itself. When you turn it on in the new location, page through to the satellite screen, press [menu] and select [new location]. I don't know how long the auto choice takes, but the map selection should be obvious.

It's in the URL of your profile. You can also hover over the [see the forum posts for this user] link.

Since he has been logging virtuals all over the world, there's no doubt it isn't a case of delayed logging. I would email lewisclan and explain that you must actually visit the site of a virtual cache to log it. Delete the log if he doesn't respond. This points up a little gotcha for the owners of virtual caches. Either strive to require information you know can be found only at the site (very difficult), or require a picture posted with the log showing the cacher at the site.