adjensen

Welcome to the hobby! One recommendation that you'll hear over and over, so I'll be the first, is to not hide a cache until you've found a number of them. Not only will it give you some good ideas of what to do with your hide, but it should also give you some ideas of what not to do. The first time I found a lamp post micro, I thought that was pretty cool. I'm no longer so enthusiastic about them. Although it's really easy to get caught up in the whole thing, and to want to "give back," it's generally a good idea to wait on that until you're sure that it's something you want to do, and you can give back quality, rather than quantity.

Urban micros: I bring the GPSr and a dog. Oh, and my wife to actually find it Rural, near the road: Aforementioned items, plus a camera and swag bag Rural, elsewhere: Aforementioned items, plus a hiking stick, first aid kit, flashlight, compass and water I have all of the "gear" in a fanny pack kind of thing that has two water bottle holders, so I just snag that out of the back of the truck along with the hiking stick. I've always carried a compass, and now that I've had one for a while, I'd never do a wilderness cache without the hiking stick. Even in places I didn't think I'd need it, it came in handy. When we think of it, we bring two-way radios, cause Patti will bail out on a ridiculous cache once in a while and it's nice to stay in touch. Of course, we usually think of it once we're ready to separate, and the radios are sitting in a cabinet back at the house

I attempted to place the first cache in a MN State Park by nailing a micro to the world's largest Jack Pine, but was denied by the ranger. Seriously, we decided to place a cache in our favourite NW Minnesota park, Lake Bronson. As fortune would have it, turns out that it's the first legal placement. Working with the ranger was very helpful, both to him and to us. Would have been a much different experience, had we just filled out the form and mailed it in without talking to anyone. Six Sisters cache: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCYKET

I don't see anything in the cache description that says that you can't go find it at night. Just saying "please attempt to find during the daylight" is surely going to result in a "I attempted to hold off til dawn, but couldn't do it" from a rabid FTF'r.

Using an anonymizer (which has the effect of you->anonymizer_service->internet / internet->anonymizer_service->you) would accomplish what you think you're doing, but few non-felons know enough to use one. Your info is out of date. As the user posted above, they use the Torpark browser, which makes it simple for even Grandma to use a anonymizer. I stand corrected, though unless Grandma reads slashdot or digg, she's probably just as unaware I don't use Windows, though, to browse the Internet, so I guess all my trips to geocaching.com and ebay are piling up at the local Echelon choke point

That's a good point, and I should have mentioned that the the FTF post (by an experienced cacher) says "may need some care soon". So it was a crappy hide anyway. Probably says a lot more about the hider than the brother, though. Unless the brother had an account and monitored the online listing, he would never know to go look at it. The owner, on the other hand, got the notices and, at the very least, should have posted a note saying "sorry, I'll have the maintainer go look at it," regardless of whether he did or didn't. Not to have done so just seems inept.

Did it need maintenance? If not, it was probably not necessary for him to pop by. Until there's a problem, I don't know that we need to be nursemaiding a box. You hear it's missing, or the log is full, or someone put a porno mag in it, yeah, you want to be Johnny-On-The-Spot to resolve it, but beyond that, I don't know that it requires any attention.

Unless you use a proxy anonymizer, your IP address is still logged at the server, regardless of what you think that you've changed it to. Within your home network, your router may assign you a different IP, but your router always keeps the one assigned to it, and that will be logged on the web server. Firefox (or your browser) might represent it to be something else, but without the correct IP, you wouldn't get anything back from the web server. It's like your home address. You can tell everyone it's two houses down, but then you're not going to be getting your mail. Using an anonymizer (which has the effect of you->anonymizer_service->internet / internet->anonymizer_service->you) would accomplish what you think you're doing, but few non-felons know enough to use one. (Just joking on the felons bit. Terrorists with clean records use them, too. )

You mean you found it before it was published?

He appears to log all of his caches (even includes the number of the find,) but at least he has the decency to let someone else have FTF

Cue someone to ask why there isn't a Walmart with a light pole and/or dumpster in your town Seriously, though, the rule about being close to a school is there to keep you and the people looking for your cache from getting in dutch with the police and/or school officials, who wonder why there are all these people hanging around the play ground. The world is a big place, there are lots of cool locations that would be better cache locations. If you've got some sort of real need to put it next to the school, talk to the school officials, explain what you're doing and get permission. I think that, if you have express written permission, you can put the dang thing in the lunchroom if you want.

I've been hearing that for quite some time, without seeing any actual software come out of the Garmin labs I was just given an eXplorist 600 by my wife as a replacement for our Meridian Gold that's going south, so I can't give you any helpful feedback beyond "I found one cache with it, and it worked fine" and "I took the 600, Meridian Gold and our Garmin iQue (what can I say, we own a lot of GPSr ) out to hide a cache and, under tree cover, all three gave pretty much the same readings." It's a notch above the old Gold, and I have more faith in its battery life, durability and reception than I do for the iQue. I've got 30 days to decide whether I want to keep this, so I'll be putting it through its paces. As far as using it with my Mac, I downloaded Bootcamp, bought a copy of XP, and now I can connect up to it.

... so, who would do it? My wife and I were thinking about a travel bug that would have a goal of visiting her six sisters that are scattered around the world. But I'm not really keen on bugs/coins, because mine keep vanishing. So, last night, as I'm going to sleep, I thought about creating a ridiculous multi-cache. First location is here in Grand Forks, the subsequent locations are where these sisters are (2 in Minneapolis, 1 in Montana, 1 in Seattle, 1 in Colorado, and 1 in the UK) and the final is back here. The sisters can maintain the micros in their locations, which would simply be something that listed the coordinates of the next stage. I highly doubt that I'd put this out, but it just got me to wondering 1) whether it could be approved and 2) whether anyone would do it. I would guess that one person/team would eventually do it to be FTF, then no one would ever do it again.

Good job, thank you very much, everyone who was involved with this process. Ironically enough, I spent the last week talking to North Dakota Game and Fish about allowing caching in state WMAs (at this point, there's no stated policy beyond "it would be considered illegal dumping.") Essentially, they said that they've talked about it and they've come to the conclusion that they can't be all things to all people, and the hunters and ATV'rs that currently have use of WMA lands is enough. So, Northwest Minnesota State Parks will be getting the series of wilderness caches I was planning to place.

A week or two is one thing, three months is quite another. And, truth be told, if this person (who, again, is not a noob) would have responded to my polite emails with a "holding for a trip" or "sorry, will get it moving again" I wouldn't care too much about the length of time. Just ignoring the emails tells me that they're fully aware that they're out of line, and they just don't care.

Generally, if we haven't found it in fifteen minutes or so, we check the clue. If there's no clue (or the ever useful encrypted "You don't need a clue"), we curse the hider for a short while, then, clue or no clue, ten or fifteen minutes more, and we've had enough. Depends on the circumstances, though. If it's forty below or raining or we've someplace to be, a DNF may result from a ten minute search. If I know it's a hard find, I'll go under optimal conditions, and devote an hour or more.

I've come across some doozies while reading through your "Cache at your own risk" bookmark list and just about died reading some of the log entries. I don't know if I'm sorry at the small number of entries on your list (less things to laugh at) or glad that there aren't more of these clueless hiders.

I totally agree. The beauty of popping a PQ of caches into your pda using Plucker or Cachemate, is that you don't have to consider where you will be caching (in your PQ area). If you are across town and find that you have some spare time, you simply fire up your pda and GPSr and take a look at the closest caches. If they interest you, you go after them. True story: Last month, we went to my niece's wedding in the Twin Cities. My wife was the matron of honour and had a bunch of family stuff to do as well, so I brought along the iQue, with a PQ of the area. I was bored at one event, so I flipped open the iQue, got our location, found a cache within walking distance, and went over and did it. Not sure that that endeared me to my wife, but at least I wasn't whinging about being bored At another event during the trip, we did the same thing, although in that case, it was to show other members of her family what the whole caching thing was about. Found our location, spotted a cache in the same park, and walked over and showed everyone how to find it.

I played with the little online tool and couldn't find any real difference in the maps between City Select and City Navigator. I wouldn't upgrade my GPSr just to change from one to the other. Also, the V is a better unit for hiking, in my opinion than the Nuvis. I wouldn't go hiking with it, if for no other reason than I don't want to drop the dang thing in a lake At least if I drop the iQue (which is already starting to look pretty beat up,) it's a $350 purchase, not an $850 one I'm not really sure about the difference between CS and CN. Number of POIs, I suppose. The maps seem pretty much the same, although again, I can't say that I've been paying super close attention to CS7 in the iQue. I'm pretty happy with either one.

That does seem pretty straightforward, and beyond organization and volume, probably works pretty well. The benefit (for me, at least,) of paperless caching with pocket queries is that it requires less "ahead time" preparation. Run a pocket query on where I'm going, and, boom, I've can pull up full listings of every cache once I'm there. In the past, I've tried to do the "okay, I'm going here, I'll try and find five caches I can do" and been frustrated with the results, when some were missing, too hard, or in locations that weren't as easy to get to as I'd thought before I got there. As has been mentioned elsewhere (including this thread ) everyone has a different method and idea of how paperless caching should work. Your solution sounds great for you, and probably many others. Thanks for sharing.

While the GPS V is an older model, it does a good job at autorouting and can use City Select 7 maps. I'm not sure, but I think these maps are comparable to (or better than) the Americas Lite Basemap that is used by the Nuvi.Unless they're lying (not a surprise if they are, but...) my Nuvi came with City Select 8. Worlds better than CN7, which came with my 2720, which went back to the store in January because it was so bad. The Nuvi has campground loops, pretty much every minor street, and even features that MNDOT refer to as "minimum maintenance" roads (which only a maniac and/or cacher would attempt to drive on ) Interesting. According to Garmin's website, City Select 7 is the most current version. I didn't know that version 8 had been released. Either way, if it has, it will be usable with the V. Aha. Well, that was a bit of a puzzler, so I went over there myself and checked it out. Here's what they say about the Nuvi: So, it's City Navigator, not City Select. And I know that it's V8, cause the problems with V7 are now fixed. I think I misspoke about it being City Select because I have a City Select DVD sitting over here, but I think that's for my iQue, not the Nuvi. My bad

You can move it a tenth of a mile (~500 feet) without running into problems. Anything further, and it's either an archive + replant, or convincing the local reviewer that you should be able to just move it. Far easier, I'm sure, to just archive it, particularly if it's a new one.

While the GPS V is an older model, it does a good job at autorouting and can use City Select 7 maps. I'm not sure, but I think these maps are comparable to (or better than) the Americas Lite Basemap that is used by the Nuvi. Unless they're lying (not a surprise if they are, but...) my Nuvi came with City Select 8. Worlds better than CN7, which came with my 2720, which went back to the store in January because it was so bad. The Nuvi has campground loops, pretty much every minor street, and even features that MNDOT refer to as "minimum maintenance" roads (which only a maniac and/or cacher would attempt to drive on )

As one who could do such a cache (hi LB!) yes, I'm sure that I would. Don't think I could knock out a few pages in a short visit, though! Maybe you could set it up so that the "book" may be removed from the cache and taken home for an overnight or something. Don't know if you'd disable the cache while the book is "checked out" (probably not,) but that would make it a little more interesting. So I guess that jreese will write the opening chapter, eh? And if it's a micro, I'll likely provide the afterward for the third edition

Another (more expensive) option for what you'd like to do is to get a new GPSr with better maps and autorouting. We have a Garmin Nuvi that does all of the routing to the cache for us when you punch in the cache coordinates. Have to do a reality check though -- one time it offered us a route 14 miles out of the way to save what looked like about 25 feet of hiking. The Nuvi has pretty much every road that we've run across, even some crazy farmer's roads that barely meet the definition. Our iQue (which has the integrated Palm, so we use it for paperless caching,) has similar maps, though I'm not sure of the level of detail, because that's not what we use the iQue for. The additional work that you'd be looking at to get the maps in the detail you need doesn't really sound like it will be easy, and probably can not be reliably automated. Having the extra GPSr is nice, cause you also get to use it for its "supposed" real use -- routing you to the nearest Waffle House for coffee and chili after the hunt