Pokey and Reese

I think the pic is up on the ‘raw photo’ page for Persey! TB is still locked!

I hosted a CITO today that was not terribly well attended but we collected 3 truckloads of trash in a couple hours. Tonight, someone who was not there logged it as 'attended'. This person does say they did CITO in another area. Is this something that is acceptable? And do people normally contact the CO before just logging it? I just read the last 2 sentence and I seem peeved - I'm not - I'm just new and curious as to what's normal in these circumstances! Thanks in advance for any advice!

I recently found a geocache in a Provincial Park that I couldn't believe a Land Manager approved! It's only a few meters off a path, however the few meters as the crow flies involves a much longer descent down a very environmentally sensitive very steep hill. There is no other way to get to the cache other than stomping through a lot of vegetation. It seems to me that on a flat map, this one looked OK to Park Managers but if they ever actually visited the site, they would not be amused. While I love that we can hide in the park, this one concerns me that bad placements like this could impact others being allowed to hide in the park. How do I make my concerns known (and should I?) and to whom?

I would have a fit if my coords were found to be that far off! I guess it's better for me to be a bit paranoid and try everything before I publish! I tried coming at each site from multiple directions today and that helped me get some confidence in the coords. Thanks to everyone for the advice and feedback - it really is helpful.

A detailed hint is nice if the cache is hard to find even with good 3-meter-range coordinates. Or up the difficulty rate so folks know it's a tough find. I like the good-hint option because there's less wear and tear on the environment (depends on how sensitive the area is and if things are likely to be trampled or moved around (rocks, logs, etc.) Thanks for the tips! I have thought of decent hints (I hope!) the difficulty has me stumped. I've looked through some of the tougher finds I've gotten and the ratings sometimes don't seem to jive! I'm going to give it a good guess and then ask the first few finders what they thought. Us that an OK thing to do?

I actually am in the Bow Valley and a couple if my hides here will be snuggled up to Mt Lady Mac so those ones are a bit worrisome. Others will be down in the bottom of the valley so at least a bit more open land! Thanks for the pep talk, I'm definitely feeling better about the coords. I'm doing a series of 9 caches all leading to a 10th and final puzzle cache - based on movie titles. Hopefully it will be a fun series!

It depends on what "several meters off" means. If it's only something like 3-5 meters, then you're doing just fine. I wouldn't worry too much unless my GPSr was taking me more like 10+ meters away. FWIW, I used to use the waypoint averaging on my 450, but stopped some time ago. A firmware update about a year ago changed the way the GPSr performs at low speeds (including when stopped), so my GPSr seems to wander a lot more than it used to. I found the averaging wasn't doing as good a job as it used to, so I stopped using it. Now I walk up to GZ, mark a waypoint, and walk away. I'll keep going away from GZ in various directions and then walking back up to it, adjusting the waypoint incrementally as necessary, until I can regularly get to within a few meters from different directions. I'll repeat the process on at least one other visit, and sometimes more. I now seem to be getting the same accuracy I used to get with the averaging. Thanks! It's about 1 - 3 meters off. I will try your method and see how close those coordinates are to my averaged ones.

I am setting my first few hides and am paranoid about giving good coordinates! I have a garmin oregon 450 and am using the waymark averaging feature. I have gone to the sites on different days and different times for at least 5 samples for each. Problem is, when I go back and try to find the spot I want to put the cache, it seems that the coordinates put me several meters off! I live in the Rocky Mountains and am wondering if the mountains may be interference? Should I be this paranoid, or just, as others have said, "Trust the device"?