Adrenalynn

The picture was taken with a telephoto lens from about 8-10 feet. There were rocks between me and the snake and I scoped out a rapid egress route before I started taking pics! Again, if it had started moving there would have been no pics and a DNF! Here's another snake I found just yesterday. Anyone know what this one is? Note the horn-like protrusions on its head. Freedom Fighters You always find the good ones! That, boys and girls, is a classic Crotalus cerastes AKA - Arizona Sidewinder Rattlesnake. Sorry, I can't get it to the subspecies/specific ID from that photo. Too much variation. Incidentally, the "horns" fold down over the eyes to protect them as it moves through underground burrows, or when it's underground and taking down a small rabbit or something else with some fight. Pretty cool bit of evolution...

I don't see a pocket knife in that list. Handy for sharpening pencils if nothing else.

Epoxy's a good recommendation. These days, though, whenever anything metal is involved, I pretty much always break out the JBWeld...

Another vote for google earth. For pulling maps in mapquest by coords: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp

Well said!

As a photographer - I encourage you to give it some serious consideration - sounds like a great idea to me!

Just an FYI - and I really hesitate to post this: Many snakes "rattle". They deliberately shake their tail in the leaves or brush to simulate the rattling sound. That said: Don't mess with the rattle.

I don't believe I'm giving anything away - if I am, the author can let me know and I'll happily nuke this... I'm generally "pretty good" with puzzles. I wrote (and then later did countercrypto) multifactor crypto stuff though, so my brain is kinda trained in patterns from chaos... The key here was apparent inside of the first reading. I skimmed through, just naturally tossing the confusers, then got to the bottom, read part of the first paragraph before the clue sank in, slapped my forehead, then decoded. That said, it's cleverly designed, and not where/how you'd expect it to be. You can start and stop reading anywhere in the puzzle... It's somewhat represented by a block-chain style. Few such puzzles make me slap my forehead, so I'd say you've done a good job. But no, not overly difficult once you put your mind in the right frame of reference. Not a 4star for me. Probably would be for some. Honestly, I haven't done much in the way of puzzle caches, so I don't know what's out there. But that isn't stopping me from designing my first right now...

The apparent reason that Magellans *appear* to be so much better in dense cover is that they do vector averaging. If you're moving at 2.5mph at bearing 110deg and enter tree cover, 3 seconds later, I should be able to give you an idea where you are. Unless you veer off sharply or stop. That's why it takes time for them to "settle down". You need to "break averaging". The Garmin algos, on the other hand, tell you "the truth". If it doesn't have accurate position, it tells you that, and gives you its best guess based on how many sats it can see. Including none. There are advantages and disadvantages. In the field, I frequently see a friend's Maggy Meridian Gold 60-70ft off at the quick cache location where my old eMap is 4ft off. Then given a few minutes, the Meridian will slowly correct itself to pretty much match the eMap... For coarse navigation, the Magellan is the better bet. For close-in work, the Garmin probably beats it. My personal take, and personal choice (for caching) is: "If I'm 3/4mi out, I have plenty of time for course correction. If I'm 50ft away, I want the dadgum thing to tell me where I am!" - hence a big reason I swear by (and sometimes "at") my Garmin. If I were frequently hiking half the day in dense foliage where ending-up a hundred feet off just meant I had to stand on tippietoes to see my parking spot - then the Magellan would be my first choice.

Thanks Adrenalynn. I think what you stated is pretty much what I was gearing towards. Can I assume you use cachemate on your palm? I saw little else for Palm devices... it seems that to be useful I will have to register it... nice that it is so inexpensive. I started with MobiPocketreader (free) to read the ebooks. It was really cumbersome, but works. I then went to cachemate. It has its own set of problems, especially on older palm devices. It also won't run on my blackberry, where MobiPocket will. So now I kinda split the difference. But I've been caching with people who will get up from a cache, and proceed to write their entire planned log entry, with graffiti, right there on site. It's like "come on, let's go sometime today!" "oh - if I don't write this down, I'll forgot." On a piece of paper, I scratch "fnd" or "dnf", trade or tb if any, and one or two words to remind me about the hunt/hide. This works out for me. If you read my log entries, you'll see I remember enough, even on a 20 cache day, to often write a couple PAGES. YMMV, of course... At the end of the day, I still like a little piece of waterproof scratch paper, a waterproof pen, and some tiny print...

Out of curiosity, would he have perished had she said "hi my name's ____, I'm firstaid certified, can I help?" A couple times through with a stopwatch, average 2.2seconds...

TigerGPS.com has the Lowrance iFinder Go back in stock. $68.99, 16 channel differential with WAAS. Reasonably sensitive. Mapping. A lot of GPS for less than $70!

Real. Or a fake so good it also fake-bites and fake-envenomates.

Well after seeing those Leprechuan movies years ago some people just lose control around Leprechuans. Adrenalynn, if you start hanging out in the forums you will have a tough time finding more than two caches a day Not if I hang out in the forums in the wee hours waiting to pounce on the FTFs so you can't...

Yeah, I just hate dragging 70lbs of compressor, 40lbs of horn, and 250lbs of batteries out into the woods though!

Hi, Welcome! This is really answered all over the forum. Did you read around for a bit? The answer before the flame war starts yet again is "yes." or "no." Both. Neither. It's a religious argument with no correct answer. Either one will get you within a hundred feet of a geocache. From there: there's a reason geocaching.com's slogan is "where you are the search engine" Now we'll sit through a thousand posts of flaming.

Ok, Quiggle. I'll bite. Please tell us EXACTLY why my post was moderated, and The Leprechauns' was not? I'd like to know precisely how much of that rude obnoxiousness to a simple suggestion is acceptable.

A pattern that would be very hard to stumble upon accidentally becomes immediately apparent. It's impossible to make that pattern go away... It's 4am, I read it once - more a skim - and that pattern jumped out. If that's not it, or not enough to show the way, let me know and I'll continue looking for the green guy's key...

Personally, I like being up for any challenge. Any time, any where, any gravity. I've been seen running into the woods at 3am with a harness and ropes going after an FTF. That said, you're probably lucky Wy is outside of my general caching range. I'd consider an accurate estimation to be part of the challenge. So I'd head back to the truck, recover an "extraction tool" (commonly known as a "Sawzall"), return, and proceed to extract and accurately "estimate" the number of each marble... Let me pose this question: If I posted a cache that read like this: "I hid a cache on my way to work. It's somewhere within a 2mi radius of my house. There are only two dozen possible routes to my office that I'm aware of. You need to guess where I live, which route I took, and where within that 2mi. it is along said route." "Hint: It's somewhere in the vicinity of a tree." What kind of incentive would you need to go hunting it?

I'm with you there! I don't need to know what state or country. I think I can figure out safely that it's in my preset radius. How far? Super. Reviewer? I'll check the webpage for that, thanks. Date/Time? That's cool. The reviewer's "published" entry? Ummm... No. New Caches edit page? Naw, thanks. Reviewer's Profile? Oh, you've gotta be kidding me! How about: Automated message from geocaching.com SomeNewCache (Trad. 1.5/2 Small) 3.9mi N 12 32.456 -121 32.456 http://www.geocaching.com/pseudorandomjunkurl [Published 22:30 4/5/06] Now THAT'S useful, and doesn't require me to parse it out, fetch the stuff I actually need with a php script (putting additional load on gc), format a new message, then send THAT to my cell!

Personally, I'm thinking about killing all the people in my neighborhood. I'm kinda pissed they're encrouching on my space... That said: yeah, the bear killed 'em. But the bear didn't put 'em there. Life is full of risks. I'm personally all for banning forks. I cut myself under my fingernail taking one out of the dishwasher yesterday... I'd hide-out under my bed, but I'm afraid a plane might fall from the sky and crash into my house. It isn't "the bear's fault". The people were in bearland. It isn't the people's fault. They were in a campground. Sh** happens. People die. Every day, every minute, every second. Doing stupid stuff can greatly impact the likelyhood. Still, when we're talking about a few billion samples, freak uncommon events are going to happen at an astonishing rate... Now the real question here is how many people you know personally and well have been mauled to death by bears this week? That's what I thought. . . So let's not go off on the kneejerk "nuke the bears" campaign, eh? As the OP pointed-out: be aware. Hey. Great advice. I really don't think it needs to go anywhere else outside of observing that this isn't common behavior for bears, esp. black bears.

Nope, the eMap (atleast with the last four versions of the firmware) can be set to take coords in multiple formats. I have two of them, and worked on firmware for them, so I'm pretty confident. Here's some shots of how to do it: Ok, first, we're going to assume that you have the latest software (2.90) - if you don't, you can download it for free from Garmin: http://www.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=73 We're going to power-on, press "ENT" to get past the silly warning, and now we're at the map screen. Press "MENU" twice to get to the Main Menu Scroll down to System Info and hit "ENT" to check your software version. Press "ENT" to get back to the Main Menu Scroll down once more to get to "Setup" Press "ENT" Press RightArrow twice to get to "Advanced" tab. Press DownArrow once to get to "Location Format" It sounds like yours is displaying hddd.ddddd Press "ENT" and then DownArrow on the dropdown menu to get to hddd mm.mmm' Press "ENT" Confirm that hddd mm.mmm' is now displaying in the "Location Format" box. Press "ESC" twice to get back to Map mode. Press and hold "ENT" until "Mark Waypoint" appears. VOILA! You should now see the appropriate formatting! If you ever need to, you can even use this method to convert waypoints from one to another format. Save them in one, then change your Location Format, go back to the waypoint, and you'll see it in the new format... Hope that helps! - Adrenalynn

What you're looking for, to print your own barcodes, is a "barcode font". Barcode is in no way standard. There's a TON of different formats. A Code39 (or "3 of 9" code) is fairly common, and there are a bunch of free fonts that you would then generate from your wordprocessor of choice. Here's one I've used in the past: http://www.barcodesinc.com/free-barcode-font/ To read barcode, you're going to either need to learn the code, or find a scanner. If you post a picture of it, I can read a few dozen of the fairly common ones on-sight. I also have a 2D scanner that will read the complicated styles (like you see on a fed-ex package for example) and decode many of them...

Sorry for your loss! Now get you and your family, and any other domesticated pets to your doctor and vet as well... The number of tick-bourne diseases is very high, and none of them are terribly pretty. Tularemia is very common tick transmitted disease in rabbits here. The symptoms don't match up, however. To give you an idea - the mortality rate in humans for untreated Tularemia runs about 15%. These really aren't things you want to mess with... Did you take any good photos of your ticks prior to freezing them? I can ID to species just about anywhere in the US, and to sub in the west and midwest at least... Not to be insensitive, but consider leaving wild animals in the wild. There are too many domesticated animals homeless as it is. Consider one of them, prehaps, if you're wanting to bring another pet into the fold...

[edit] I'd be more than happy to help - All things considered, as soon as I get home today, I'll put up a phpbb or smf forum for the express purpose of facilitating what you suggest, Monkeygirl! adrenalynn [atsign] sonotthedrama.net I'd be of most help in math-based puzzles, since that was my major (MS Math/MS CompSci), and my thesis (and first few jobs) was on Crypto.