steelpaw

I'm too old for little toys, and so I never take or leave swaps. Nevertheless, I am gobsmacked by the absolute crap that some cachers leave as 'swaps'. A bread tag? A potato chip? A single sock? A used hair scrunchy? A business card? A used train or bus ticket? A masonry plug? A rubber band? I've encountered all of these, and taken them from the cache and thrown them away. This kind of junk is not appealing to children and is of no value to adults. Why would anyone leave it?

I honestly have no idea why you feel disappointment. All I feel is a slight amusement about how silly they're being. They're failure doesn't diminish my success no matter how they report it. I'm disappointed to see other people behave less honourably than I would have in a similar situation. I like to think the best of people, and it disappoints me when they behave badly, particularly when they are within a group with whom I identify.

Similarly, I don't think it's really in the spirit of geocaching to log a find for a cache that you have seen, but not been able to access due to the difficulty of the terrain. I recently found a terrain 3.5 cache that was up a tree. Not very far up, certainly not far enough to require ropes and climbing gear, but high enough to be out of reach of even the tallest person standing on the ground; and high enough to be a bit of an effort for this middle aged cacher. I was disappointed to read the logs later and see many claimed finds along the lines of "Could not sign log due to mobility issues", "As we didn't have a ladder or small children with us we were unable to sign", "Sighted the cache but too high up to record details of visit", "Could not log as we can't reach without a ladder". It seems to me that if you can't reach the cache, then you can't really claim to have found it as a terrain 3.5 cache. At best, you have found a hypothetical terrain 1 cache at the base of the tree.

Rust does not do any damage to the environment. Indeed, there have been a number of suggestions that adding iron to the oceans will reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and thus reduce global warming. A steel container will eventually rust harmlessly away to nothing. However, plastic pollution of the oceans is a more serious issue. A plastic container will eventually break up into small pieces of plastic that cause great harm to sea creatures, including sea birds that eat them and eventually starve to death because their crop becomes filled with indigestible plastic.