ktmhz

Today was a good animal day geocaching outside of Tucson. We did a 5/4.5 cache that was at the top of a peak outside of town, and saw a pair of hawks + nest in the top of a saguaro. On the way down, we saw 3 deer take off, and a bit later, we saw a deer that was not doing any taking off. He was in bone form, scattered over a 100 foot patch of hillside!

I'd like to see some more caches in trees. Maybe if there are a bunch of tree caches that require technical climbing equipment, I would learn about a new activity so I can find those ones. But even just smaller trees that can be climbed with no special equipment are a lot of fun. Some of my favorite finds have been up trees, but it would be nice if the caches in tree ratio was greater than my cache in tree find ratio of 1/70. If every tenth or twentieth cache were in a tree, I think that would be pretty splendid. Many tree caches should be 15-20 feet up and accessible by normal, non-superhuman folk without equipment. My hides will be in trees when I start hiding after I settle down and stop having widespread adventures and pandemonium.

We found this machete while climbing a peak on which a cache was hidden. The machete had just been left on the steep side of the mountain where there was no trail or anything. We took it along to the other caches we found, and then took it home! Its condition suggested that it had been there for many years.

I seem to be in the minority here, but I don't think that charging extra for google maps is any good. Google satellite imagery is nice, but can be accessed in geocache management software such as OpenCacheManager or (presumably) GSAK. I already have all the caches for the area in my OpenCacheManager database, so using it to plan trips instead of the geocaching.com maps is no big deal. I would be happy with the maps if OSM was the default map and it had a scale on it. I already use OSM as the map on my garmin, and I am pretty impressed with its detail and accuracy, at least around here. Being a dude who just graduated from college and isn't making much money, I really would rather not drop any more money than necessary so that everyone else can have the beloved google maps back. I would agree with the few previous posters who said that free membership ought to remain free; I know that for me, a lot of the fun is introducing the game to others who don't necessarily want to spend $30 on a new activity but still want to be able to participate with me.

I usually enjoy it more when I set off all day on bicycle and find 5-10 really nice caches. Or my girlfriend and I take off walking all day or take the train or whatever and find a couple of caches and have a nice adventure or picnic. I've got some pals with cars, and we go out caching in those sometimes, but it's not really a necessity. Even when I was living out in the boonies, where there were only a few caches within 10 miles, it was still plenty fun to go out on a walking or bicycling expedition to get the caches. But in any case, I usually enjoy the caching experience more when I am just finding a few and doing something else excellent on the way. It is about the adventure, and cars don't usually provide much adventure (though they are good for getting to the start of a hike and stuff).

Only recently started hunting me some trackables, but I would really like to see this idea implemented. I end up having to do a lot of work before I set out to figure out which caches are likely to actually have the trackables still there, and this would make it a lot easier.