nedyken

1. Solve mysteries. 2. Enter corrected coordinates on the cache listing. 3. add cache to bookmarklist 4. make bookmarklist a pocket query 5. run PQ 6. load PQ onto your GPS 7. Go find them 8. log them online Thank you on4bam. I played around a little with this. I figured out one step you didn't list. I realized that if on the main geocache page I search all caches with the filter "Has Corrected Coordinates", it will very quickly show me only mystery caches we've solved. Then I can add them to a list and do a pocket query as you said. I appreciate the help. Thanks!

thanks Jester. I played around with it yesterday and figured out how to do a couple things with it. Also, it was nice meeting you at the geocaching event last weekend. Thanks for the tips!

Nevermind! I think I used software called MapSource 4 years ago when I had a PC, but now I'm on a mac. I did some googling and found an app called Garmin MapInstall that let me pretty easily install the downloaded map. There's still some stuff I don't totally remember how to do, but I think this got me where I needed to go. Thanks !

My wife and I have basically avoided mystery caches. Recently, we noticed a large group of 50 of them listed around some local hiking trails. Here's how the large group of mystery caches appears on the iOS geocaching app with the first one in the series selected: Obviously, as you solve the puzzles, the actual coordinates of the geocache location greatly differs from where the mystery is placed. For instance, we solved the first one and you can see the final coordinates are pretty far north of where the puzzle is placed. I do like that the iOS app gives you the ability to plug in the correct coordinates and start a route towards them, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to just pull up the map with the solved locations appearing by default. This is a problem, because on hiking trails, it's difficult to know exactly which trails I need to take to get to the geocache. I'm able to see hiking trails on my Garmin Oregon 450 and have some experience loading pocket queries on it with traditional caches. For instance, here's how the that same system of trails appears on my Garmin: I'm just wondering... what's the best way to load the solved coordinates of several mystery caches on the Garmin? Ideally, I want to be able to look at a map of trails on my garmin and instantly see the locations of all the solved coordinates of all 50 mystery caches. I'm just not sure the most efficient way to do that. I hope my question makes sense. Any help would be appreciated.

One thing I absolutely despise about geocaching is the learning curve in regards to dealing with handheld GPS devices. I figured out all this stuff 3-4 years ago when I originally started geocaching. I had NW Trails ( http://www.switchbacks.com/nwtrails/ ) installed on my Garmin Oregon 450, but at some point I must have accidentally uninstalled it. Now years have gone by and I can't remember how I installed it. I'm pretty sure I was using a piece of software called Base Camp. I think maybe I had a topo map installed as well? Which topo map do you recommend? And how do I go about installing NW Trails. I'd appreciate anyone that can point me in the right direction.

Thanks! I'll take a look. Any tips while I'm out there? It's my first time ever out of the States. I'm very excited.

Hi friends, I live in Seattle, WA. I am traveling to Ireland for the first time and considered doing a little geocaching while I was there. Here in Washington State, I use my Garmin Oregon 450 for Geocaching. There is huge hiking community out here and an outstanding community-created free map available for the Garmin that covers the entire region. It basically shows every hiking trail in the entire State. I was curious if there were any free Garmin maps you'd recommend for when I'm in Ireland. Thanks in advance for any help!

Thanks again to everyone who gave us some great hiking/geocaching suggestions around Leavenworth. My girlfriend (Kitty) and I just spent the past week over there and managed to do a little caching in between stuffing our faces with bratwurst and schnitzel. We didn't manage to hike all the suggested trails and visit all the suggested caches, but did get a chance to find a few. Actually, we ending up finding one that had been "lost" for close to three years. I thought it was kinda fun so I figured I'd share the story. On Tuesday, we were finding some of the caches along the river when we eventually made our way to the "Dragon Tomb" cache: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=8ac1c4b8-c467-4f99-8bb8-523ee9bec467 . It was a pretty cool cache just outside of a creepy cave/tunnel. My GPS was bouncing all over the place, so I checked the logs for some additional hints. I eventually found the cache, but something in the logs stuck with me. It was a comment by EUJANTU: We found this interesting... so we decided to see if we could find what EUJANTU was referring to. We followed EUJANTU's instructions and using a flashlight we quickly spotted the same thing. It looked like a cache was stuck just out of reach in a "hole" between two rocks. It was wedged deep in the hole out of reach and seemingly unmovable... but we decided to make it our personal mission to set it free. Many minutes, broken sticks, scratched arms, and one lost flashlight later... and we managed to free the lost cache from the pit of doom. OH yeah... and there was a chipmunk up above us on the hillside who kept kicking pebbles at us, but that's another story. Anyhow... it was indeed the now archived "When Midnight Falls Upon The Castle": http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=05540081-72b1-4f47-a895-87c8dca37ce9 . It was originally placed in 2002, but hadn't been logged since October 2009. We even managed to find a "missing" trackable inside. Pretty fun. I wrote a little more and included some pics on the archived cache page. Not sure if the owner is still active or if reactivating is a possibility (it might conflict with the "Dragon Tomb" cache), but it was fun to rescue it nonetheless.

Thanks for all the awesome suggestions. We will definitely try to hike a couple of them. So far, we have just done some of the caches along us2 leading into town. We did manage to rescue an archived/lost geocache that was placed in 2002 and hasn't been found for nearly 3 years... so that was pretty cool. There was a trackable in there listed as "missing" as well... Im sure the owner will be glad we found it

My girlfriend and I found out last second that we both were able to take this week off (Mon-Fri). We live in Bellevue. Airfare everywhere was too expensive last-minute so we decided to rent a condo in Leavenworth, WA. We'll be there all week and plan to do some hiking/geocaching. Anyone have any recommended trails we should check out while we are in the area?

Thanks for the info MrsB. Well I happen to be lucky in that I live in Washington State (home of Groundspeak) and found the lackey coin around some hiking trails about 20 miles from where their headquarters is located. When I got home, I checked the logs for that particular cache and noticed that around a month ago a huge group of 11 people all logged a visit to that cache at once. Turns out it was for a "Lackey Training event"... so perhaps one of them left it in there for the next finder... which happened to be my girlfriend and I. Well it's a pretty cool coin. It's double sided and in color... with a character on each side representing two different lackeys. My girlfriend leaves cool stuff in every cache we visit so we definitely had that one covered. So I guess it wouldn't be frowned on for me to keep this one? And... if someone decides to collect/keep a geocoin, should they still activate it? Edit: Posted this before I saw your response, Isonzo Karst... it all happened in a bit of a blur, because we were in the middle of the woods with shorts and the mosquitos were bothering us if we stood in one place for too long... so it wasn't until I got home that I properly inspected it and found the logs from the lackey training event. This coin is definitely not active. It has an activation code in the sleeve. I just wasn't sure what I should do with it. Again... if I decide to keep it, should I still activate it? I'm guessing the only purpose for that would be so it listed in my profile?

My girlfriend and I are still really new to geocaching. I've read the entire FAQ on the "geocaching 101" page, but I'm still a little confused on geocoins. I understand trackables. We've found a couple. I've grabbed a trackable tag from a geocache that "belonged" to a local Girl Scout unit... we noticed it had been sitting in a cache within their home town for a good two months and hadn't moved so we "grabbed" it, had it visit 20 or so locations until I finally found a safe place on a hiking trail a few towns over to drop it off at. In that case, we felt like we were doing it for the kids... felt bad that their trackable had just been sitting unwanted a half mile from their base of operations. Another instance, I spotted a trackable tag and logged it as "discovered", but left in in the cache (we didn't want the responsibility). Early on we came across a really cool "Beaver Dude goes to GeoWoodstock VI Geocoin" that caught our eye. That one had a specific goal of visiting as many tourist spots as possible... we've been having it visit as many locations as possible and intend to drop it when we find a good spot for it. So I guess I understand the basics of it. Today we happened to find a geocoin in a cache that was not listed in the cache inventory. We thought that was strange so I took it home so I could figure out what to do with it (assumed it had been lost and not logged properly). Turns out it's not even an active coin yet. It's a "Lackey" geocoin... and each side seems to represent a different lackey. I've read enough to understand that a "Lackey" is just what employees of Groundspeak are called. What am I supposed to do with this? Is it expected that I activate it and drop it somewhere? Do people sometimes keep geocoins that have yet to be activated yet?. What I mean is... are they collectable? It's a cool coin... I wouldn't mind keeping it, but if that's discouraged I'd be glad to move it along. I'm just a little confused about the world of geocoins in general. Some of the threads I've found almost made it sound like people keep/trade/collect coins with no intention of moving them anywhere. Doesn't that go against the spirit of a "trackable"? Very sorry if this has been explained elsewhere on this forum. So much information I must be missing it.

Thanks again, _Shaddow_... that's an excellent point about "scatter". I can see how sitting around trying to find a geocache for an hour while the GPS bounces around would log as movement. Excellent point. According to google earth the elevation gain was 1648 and loss was 1640... somewhat close to what BaseCamp was telling me. I'm going to send you a private e-mail with a specific question about Google Earth. Look out for it.

"_Shaddow_" and "The Jester" ... that's actually exactly why I asked the question about elevation gain. I thought it might have been a stupid question, but I'm glad I asked it. I noticed that in BaseCamp if I double clicked on my track it would give me a ton of data: I noticed in the first tab (top pic) it shows the Ascent at 1682 ft and Descent at 1543 ft. I realized there was a lot of up and down on that trail... so would that 1682 ft be what you are referring to as cumulative gain? ... My other method was to just look at the area I started (684 ft at the trailhead) and the highest point I reached (1488 ft mid-way through the trip) and figure my elevation gain was 800 feet. _Shaddow_, I actually don't have Google Earth installed. Is this data any different than what I'm getting just by double clicking on the track within BaseCamp? Reason I'm asking is because I've seen a few hiking blogs and my girlfriend recently brought home an issue of "Washington Trails" that keeps referencing "elevation gain". I wasn't sure what that referred to. Obviously 1682 ft is greater than 800 ft. Hah. For instance, in "Washington Trails" Magazine it shows a 12 mil round trip "Coldwater Peak" hike with an elevation gain of 2000 ft. I didn't if I should be comparing that to 1682 or 800.

I'll try to keep this brief, but wanted to post an update on this thread. As I explained, I found a used Garmin Oregon 450 off craiglist for $120. I had a chance to use it yesterday for our first attempt at real hiking/geocaching. First... I still LOVE the iPhone app for a number of reasons. If you live in the city/suburbs and have zero intention of ever exploring a mountain/forest/park... it's probably going to be fine for you. It's think the map views and interface are cleaner than most dedicated GPS devices. The satellite maps are fantastic for urban caching (where you can see landmarks/buildings/etc). It's a very easy experience... start the app, run a search for you area... and boom... You're off and running. I will continue to use it for randomly finding geocaches when I'm out and about with my girlfriend. That said, I went on a hike yesterday... and the iPhone was absolutely USELESS. Zero reception. Zero internet... wonky GPS. Just absolutely useless for geocaching. And of course, even if it had worked, satellite view (my favorite feature) would have been useless anyways... all you'd see is tree cover. I have to question anyone who claims the iPhone is "all you'd need". Anyone who says that probably lives in the city and has never been on a hike. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me. Up until yesterday I had been using my Garmin and iPhone collectively. I'd use the Garmin for finding caches and then post logs with my iPhone. That was absolutely impossible yesterday. Absolutely no connectivity once we were in the forest. It was useless. Now... I believe it might be possible to use pocket queries (much like you'd do with a dedicated GPS) to download geocaches for offline use. However, I am not entirely sure how downloading map data would work on the phone. Seems to me you'd need to also download the maps for the to be effective. BTW, if you are confused what I'm talking about here... put your iPhone in "airplane mode" and try loading up google maps. Having issues? Yup. It's because your phone needs connectivity to download the map data you are trying to access. Without internet connectivity, it can't load map data. This is why my phone was essentially useless today. The Garmin, however, was fantastic. Because I had a free "Northwest Trails" map loaded on it, I was able to see exactly where I was taking us through the woods and know exactly which of the many interconnecting trails to take us down. We were out there for 7 hours. I had the Garmin on the entire time. Thanks to Garmin's "BaseCamp" app, I can see that we walked a total of 10.2 miles. We found 18 geocaches. It was a blast. Because my iPhone was useless, I simply used my Garmin and selected "found" or "not found" for each cache we attempted. When we got home, I discovered how exceptionally easy it is to plug the Garmin into my computer, upload the "field notes" file into geocaching.com and start posting logs for the 18 caches we found. In fact, it was so easy that I think I'll be doing this for all our large geocaching adventures... it beats fiddling with the phone trying to type a log at each individual cache. Here's a screen shot from BaseCamp that shows the entire Geocache/hike loop we took: Thank you to everyone who gave me advice in this thread. I absolutely do not regret buying the Garmin. The iPhone may be all someone needs if they are looking for caches in neighborhoods... but there is no way I would have been able to geocache those trails today without a dedicated GPS device.

Thanks again for everyone's awesome suggestions. I figured I'd share the first results of your collective advice. My girlfriend got out of work early yesterday and we managed to check out Cougar Mountain. I think I'm finally getting a handle on the tech side of hiking/geocaching. A few newbie sudden realizations: #1 - My iPhone was essentially useless over there. Almost zero reception. So glad I bought the Garmin. I'm not sure it would be at all possible to geocache/hike using the geocaching app. No internet/no signal/terrible gps reception with the phone. This threw me a bit, because even up until this hike I had continued to use my phone for posting logs. I soon realized that wasn't going to be possible... so I just used my Garmin to select "found" and just crossed my fingers that I'd have a way of uploading those as logs later on. Once I got home it only took me a couple minutes to figure out how to upload my field notes file and start posting my logs. I actually really like how easy that is. I think I'll do it for now on instead of fiddling with my phone all the time. #2 - In the rare instances my iphone DID get reception, I suddenly noticed that the iPhone geocaching app does not seem to show "premium member only" caches. What's up with that? Mind you, I now have a premium membership... shouldn't they be popping up? I noticed that many of the caches I had loaded on the garmin were "premium only" and yet the iPhone app pretended like they didn't exist. Not a big deal, but a couple times I got stumped and wanted to see if any pictures had been posted on the cache (which the garmin doesn't have access to). Edit: Did some googling and figured out my premium member issue. I needed to delete the app and reinstall it #3 - I ran a pocket query for the area about 5 days ago so I already had all the caches loaded on my Garmin. We then spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find a specific cache that had us rather frustrated. Eventually we gave up. When I got home, I noticed that the owner of the cache had deactivated it 3 days ago as "missing". Obviously this log wasn't showing up in my Garmin, because my data was 5 days old. Rookie mistake! At least I learned my lesson... make sure to run an updated pocket query before I head on a journey. I used the GPS loaded with Northwest trails to take us on a bit of a loop from Red Town Trailhead. I later realized I could see all the "path" data via Base Camp (pretty darn cool, really)... We started at 2:00pm and got back to the car around 9:00pm before it got dark. Spent a little under 7 hours over there and had a great time. Found about 18 geocaches. Apparently we walked around 10.2 miles... which actually seems low considering we were out there for 7 hours, but we spent at least 2 hours "stopped" while looking for caches (we spent nearly an hour at "A Big Grate Hole" alone. We knew it was there somewhere and we were determined to find it. Luckily, we eventually did). I have a incredibly dumb question, but have to ask it. I noticed that the Trailhead showed the elevation as roughly 684 ft... and I think the highest point we reached was around the "Jerry's Duck Pond" cache at roughly 1488 ft. When people refer to "elevation gain" are they simply referring to the difference? So in other words, would I say the "elevation gain" of our hike was around 800 feet? Yes... very stupid question... I know... I know. So here it is... our first serious attempt at actually hiking: http://i.imgur.com/NJ8df.jpg Once again, thanks for all your help. You guys are awesome.

You need to log out of the forum and then log back in for it to show. You nailed it.

Yes, Cougar Mountain is certainly one of my favorite spots. Huge wildland park easily accessed from nearby urban areas, with over 32 miles of hiking trails, and plenty of mining, railroad, and logging history thrown in. Short trails, longer trails, something for everyone. Check out the Cougar Mountain bookmark list for help locating the caches and choosing your hikes. There's also a park map online (PDF version) or at the Red Town and Sky Country trailheads. I prefer geo-hiking myself, and would be happy to introduce you to Cougar caching (with historical narrative ) or any other nearby hiking areas. I live in Newcastle. Welcome to our addiction! Edit to add: I see you're a Basic Member, so you won't see many of the caches in Cougar (including some of the best ones, imho) as they are PMO (Premium Members Only) due to some recent issues with vandalism. Just FYI. If you think you'll continue to cache, it's way worth it to pony up for a Premium Membership here - $30/year is a great deal for all the benefits in addition to seeing PMO caches. Just sayin'. I actually am a Premium member already. I had to get premium membership so I could do pocket queries... plus it just seemed like the right thing to do. It should show it if you check my actual profile. Maybe this forum just doesn't show that by my name for some reason? Thanks for the helpful links. I'll certainly check those out. My girlfriend unfortunately doesn't have a normal Mon-Fri schedule. She's runs the cake decorating department at a bakery and has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. I'm a video editor and currently all my work is freelance... which means I get to match my schedule to hers, but unfortunately it severely limits when we can go on group hikes. I've told a few friends about geocaching and most of them are intrigued by the concept and interested to go on hikes, but sadly they could only go during weekends (when my girlfriend is working). Another awesome member actually sent me a private message this morning inviting us for a hike planned this weekend. Sadly we'll probably have to do most of our geocaching/hiking by ourselves for now. I guess on the bright side, we seem to be avoiding too many muggles on our adventures so far... most folks are busy working when we are out there.

Thanks for the awesome suggestions everyone. I'll definitely try to get around to visiting all of these locations. Cougar Mountain sounds like it will be an excellent place to start. I noticed that the Red Town Trailhead is only a 15 minute drive from where we live in Downtown Bellevue. I'm assuming that's a good location to park when there. I actually just had a "oh cool!... I'm such a noob" random discovery while playing around with BaseCamp... I was confused what the purpose was of BaseCamp when compared to MapSource, but I suddenly realized that I plugged in my Garmin while looking at Basecamp, I could view all of my data such as the saved geocaches that I have loaded on there. Suddenly it was showing me parking lot logos on the trailheads. That's pretty helpful. Those parking lots don't seem to be tied to any of the maps I have loaded... are they just glorified waypoints created by the folks who created the nearby geocaches along the trails? Hah... like I said, I'm totally a rookie... I just keep accidentally learning new things. Also to "The Jester", thanks a bunch for pointing me towards NW Topos. I was loving NW Trails already, but I can see that NW Topos is a lot cleaner than the method of overlaying NW Trails over that Washington State Topo map I had downloaded. I'm still new to the world of handheld GPS, but I'm digging this Garmin already. I wasn't sure what the recommended maps were. I was curious how much better (if at all) the Garmin 24k NW Topo map was when compared to the free alternatives. Side note: Is there a preferred alternative to Garmin's City Navigator for general driving? I had briefly read something about a free OpenStreets map, but haven't bothered downloading it. Thanks again for all the quick help. I can already tell this community is fantastic. I felt like I was a chicken running around with his head cut off, but just these last 5 responses alone were super enlightening. I now realize I can look at a map of geocaches and find something like Rattlesnake Mountain... and pretty quickly see that the trailhead is "Snoqualmie Point" and the trail I'd need to hike is "Rattlesnake Mountain Trail". That kind of basic stuff had been going over my head.

My girlfriend and I live in Bellevue, WA. We're totally newbies to the world of Geocaching. Three weeks ago, I hadn't even heard of it. I instantly knew my girlfriend would love it, though... she was immediately hooked... she had built a "geocaching" kit within 2 days of hearing about it... and luckily I'm a pretty quick learner on the technology side. We've only found 49 geocaches so far. We started off just using our iPhones to find some urban caches around Seattle/Bellevue. Those are great, but we pretty quickly realized that we enjoy exploring around in the woods/parks more than we enjoy trying not to look creepy while loitering around town centers and buildings. This is how rookie we are... Last week were just driving around Issaquah, WA on our day off. I checked my iPhone geocaching app to see where the closest cluster of geocaches were hidden. Somehow we ended up around Tiger Mountain... it looked like there was a string of maybe 7 or 8 geocaches in a row. We had to assume that was a trail... so we just started blindly walking up one of the trails hoping we picked the correct one. Eventually we figured out which trail we needed to walk and we spent a couple hours having a blast finding some of the geocaches along Nook Trail and Talus Rocks. That was a ton of fun. I think we became interested in hiking by accident. I quickly realized my iPhone GPS doesn't work too well in the woods... so I bought a Garmin Oregon 450 off craigslist for $120, got it loaded with City navigator, a free Washington State TOPO map off http://gpsfiledepot.com/ ... and "Northwest Trails" http://www.switchbacks.com/nwtrails/ . I actually found Northwest Trails by accident, but man oh man I can already tell it's pretty awesome and is going to be a major help. So at this point, we feel like we have the basic gist of geocaching down... now we just need to be pointed in the right direction. Haha. I have to admit that neither of us have really done much hiking at all. Just to point out how much of a rookie I am, I'm rather embarrassed to admit that my entire concept of what "hiking" entailed was totally warped... I always envisioned "hiking" to mean bushwhacking through the woods, climbing rocks and wading through rushing rivers. I know... I'm ridiculous. It never occurred to me that there was an intermediate level that included fun cleared trails through the forest. So bottom line... It's safe to say that we have walked/hiked NONE of the popular trails in this state. I just know that we had a lot of fun walking up Nook trail to Talus Rocks and finding geocaches along the way. Any suggests for similarly fun intro-level hiking (with geocaches along the way) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I have to give a hat tip to Chief301 for exchanging a few emails with me. I had a bunch of detailed questions and he was pretty awesome about answering all of them. There's definitely a learning curve with this stuff, but I got the basic idea after a couple days. It was more about understanding what was the purpose of certain tools (like BaseCamp and MapSource). It was all very alien to me. Had to figure out that I'd have to acquire a map... use an app like MapSource to chop out the part of the map I wanted to transfer to my device... figure out what the heck a pocket query was... etc. But I think I have the basics down now. I ended up buying a used Garmin Oregon 450 off craigslist for $120. I have it set up with the city navigator map and a free Washington State topo map from the aforementioned http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ ... The good news for me at least is that I live in the Northwest... and I found a free Northwest Trails map ( http://www.switchbacks.com/nwtrails/ ) that seems to show every trail I probably will ever visit out here. It just overlays over either the City Navigator or the Topo map I have installed. I dig it. From what I can tell, being able to see those trails will be a huge benefit when we start to do more hiking. I noticed that the maps on the iPhone (geocaching app) were nowhere near as detailed as that when it comes to specific trails. Pocket Queries were simple enough to get a hang of and we already made good use of the Garmin a couple days ago. I'll still probably use my iPhone a bit for posting logs and for using stuff like satellite view (which is awesome on urban caches). I'm seeing how the tools on the Garmin can be really helpful as we start to move more towards hiking into the woods... and so far it does indeed seem like the GPS on the Garmin is a lot more accurate. I appreciate all the help everyone has given in this thread

Lol I just felt like saying Workflow. :-P I think i'll buy a handheld off craigslist. Looks like my options are the Garmin eTrex 20, Dakota 20 and Oregon 450... or the Magellen eXplorist GC... looks like all can be had for 50-150 used.

awesome link "Bear and Ragged". Thanks a bunch. From that, I think I definitely want a "paperless" and "touch screen" model... probably one of the Garmin Oregons? The Montanas seem a lot more expensive and I don't know if I'd really need all the extra storage space. Still slightly confused on the "maps" part of it. Do you have to pay extra for specific maps or is it unnecessary?

I know, I know... I'm the worst kind of person. I go to a forum just chalked full of people asking the exact same question over and over again... I skim over it... quickly panic and give up... and ask the same darn question again. Sorry. I'm terrible. Please be gentle. I'll do my best to be specific and as concise as possible. My girlfriend and I have been geocaching for a few weeks. We already love it. She's already made a "geocaching" kit... we've done more walking/hiking in the past few weeks than we've done in the entire 2 years we've been together. It's a blast. We're hooked. I've been just using my iPhone 4 and the pretty solid geocaching app. I actually love it. Our workflow is pretty simple (amateur?) right now. We go on geocaching.com ... scout out some interesting areas (on the website you can pull up a map of EVERYWHERE and just see where geocaches are hidden) ... then once we figure out where we'd like to go geocaching, we just drive to the area and park. The handy iphone app lets you search for geocaches in your immediate proximity... and boom... we're geocaching. Super simple and user-friendly for finding caches, routing to caches using the built-in map (or the iphone's map application)... super simple to pull up recent logs, photos and hints if necessary. Super simple to post your log, deal with any trackables, etc. Excellent app. That said, it didn't take us long to discover the... Obvious problems: #1 - the iPhone GPS is already driving me nuts. It was all fine-and-dandy when we were searching for caches around the city of Seattle... but as soon as we tried hiking into the woods, it started laughing at me. The GPS is pretty inaccurate. It bounces all over the place. Says i'm a foot away, then 5 feet away then 10 then 100 then 5... UGH!! Luckily we've had great success in spite of this, but it's enough of a frustration that It's starting to damper on the fun. Are standalone devices THAT much better? #2 - Battery life is trash. My phone usually dies after about 5 hours (mainly because I'm playing with the app non-stop). We're thinking of getting some battery-life extension device. I imagine a standalone GPS would be a lot better for this. ... OK I can probably just stop right there. Those two issues are a big enough pain in the tush that I think it's safe to say we are in the market for a standalone device. Here's my confusion though... How does the workflow change?: I have no idea which GPS device to buy or how i'll end up using it. Like I said, I really enjoy the iPhone app. It's fantastic. I am under the assumption that a GPS device can not replace that experience (ability to easily find caches, post pictures, log trackables, comment on the cache, etc). So am I basically just looking for a device to use in CONJUNCTION with the iphone? I've never owned a standalone. How should I expect this to work? Will I be pulling finding/pulling up the caches with my iphone... then looking at the GPS coordinates at the top of the screen... and manually punching them into my standalone GPS to get accurate readings?... or is there something more I should be looking at? My girlfriend's aunt said she'd give us her old handheld GPS that she has no use for. It's a "Magellan Triton 400". Will that be sufficient? We honestly don't mind spending money on a nice handheld device... we're just not sure what we'd be paying for. Do some of them incorporate "geocaching" so well that it would potentially replace our iphone and change our workflow entirely?... or do I just keep using the iphone and simply need a device (like her Aunt's Triton 400) to manually punch in coordinates and help us when we're confused in the woods? Any advice/insight would be very appreciated. I realize I could probably get these answers from looking at the forum, but the posts I was finding seemed to be from folks who had neither an iphone 4 OR a GPS and were looking for the pros and cons of each. I already understand the pros and cons of the iphone 4... just not sure where to go from here.